Research : Plants ill scream when they are cut or if they do not have enough eater
We always think that it’s ok for us to leave our plants unattended during our vacation as
we believe that they’ll survive just fine. Plus, plants won’t scream like pets, so they must
be okay, right?
A recent study done by a group of scientists at the Tel Aviv University has discovered that
some plants will scream in a high frequency when they are undergoing stress.
The research was carried out on tomato plants and tobacco plants by cutting their stems
and depriving them of water. A microphone is placed 10cm away from the setup.
When they started cutting the stems, they found out that the plants started “screaming」
between 20 and 100 kilohertz and they believe that this scream is probably meant to
warn other plants and organisms nearby.
When the tomato plant’s stem was cut, 25 ultrasonic distress sounds were recorded over
the course of an hour, and on the other hand, 15 ultrasonic distress sounds were recorded
from the tobacco plant.
When they deprived the plants of water the tomato plants recorded even more distress
sounds with 35 distress sounds in an hour while the tobacco plants recorded about 11
distress sounds.
The plants also responded differently to different kinds of stress, for example, the tobacco
plant gave out a more intense“scream”when they were deprived of water than when their
stems were cut. But plants that were in no immediate danger released less than one
ultrasonic sound per hour.
The group of scientists then said that this changes the way we think of plants as we had
always assumed that they are silent, but the thing is their voices are so high-pitched that
we just can t hear them.
Another study has found out that plants feel pain when are touched or plucked and it will,
in turn, cause the release of a foul-tasting chemical.
Although the study only looked at tomato and tobacco plants, they believe other plants
may make sounds when stressed too. Enabling farmers to listen for water-stressed plants
could “open a new direction in the field of precision agriculture”, the researchers suggest.
They add that such an ability will be increasingly important as climate change exposes more
areas to drought.