Plants can detect sound

It would have to be pretty insanely high in the ultrasound. A 30 kHz (above the top of usual audible sound range) wave is around 10 mm (10000 µm) in wavelength; a typical prokaryote is of order 1 µm. While there are some uses for MHz-scale ultrasound, the attenuation starts getting pretty insane -- there's just not much energy at the scale of gigahertz sound to detect.

borissk5• 3 years ago

Interesting, but a longer wave will still have some impact, that can be detected by a smaller organism - or not?

bacon_waffle• 3 years ago

Imagine an elevator that moves up and down its shaft with a sinusoidal elevation over time. Riding in that elevator, one could detect frequencies with quite long wavelengths compared to the size of a person.

A less abstract example is a boat at sea.

user_7832• 3 years ago

Why would you assume that the order of magnitude of the animal is similar to the wavelength? Elephants can communicate with as low as 1hz. The wavelength of that is over 300m.

If the amplitude is high enough, human too can comfortably “feel” infrasonic.

aschearer• 3 years ago

They don't have eyes but can detect light, too...

11235813213455• 3 years ago

they don't have feet but they can detect gravity too and grow vertically when they can

archsurface2• 3 years ago

"Plants don't have ears." - Learn something new every day.

slimsag• 3 years ago

This seems verifiably false, too. Why else would it be called an 'ear' of corn?

eclecticfrank• 3 years ago

Don't trust everything on the internet. At least some plants have ears. [1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ear_(botany)

archsurface2• 3 years ago

Equivocation fallacy.

noman-land• 3 years ago

This may sound like a dumb question but can anyone explain to me why our senses are not all just considered touch? Molecules touch your tongue and you taste things. Molecules touch your nose and you smell things. Air vibrates your inner ear hairs and you hear things. Photons hit your eyes and you see things (not sure if this counts but it seems like it could).

rafale• 3 years ago

I think collision or interaction are better words. The word touch is meant for bigger objects, like hands, animals, furniture, fabrics, not molecules and electromagnetic radiation.

camillomiller• 3 years ago

Isn’t touch a biological pressure sensor though? Could be similar to hearing, sure, but taste, smell and sight are definitely more like chemical and electromagnetic sensors.

Calavar• 3 years ago

If you want to get that reductive, ultimately everything in the universe is just particles and forces and interactions between them, and any concepts beyond that are arbitrary lines drawn by us humans in an attempt to organize the chaos.

In the case of senses, it's about perception. We perceive the signals from our retinas differently than the ones from our fingertips, so we give them different names (sight vs. touch).

There are also differences in the "hardware" -- sight and touch signals start with different kinds of receptors, travel down different nerves, and are processed in different parts of the brain -- but the hardware differences don't map 1:1 to the way that we categorize senses. For example, pain and pressure are processed by entirely different types of receptors, but we still call them both touch. On the flip side, balance and hearing share a lot of the same hardware, but we consider them to be different senses.

zelphirkalt2• 3 years ago

Similar to a question I had in physics class at school, which was quickly brushed aside by the teacher, who wanted to continue with the content: Why is temperature one of the base units? Isn't temperature just movement as well? Nowadays I know I was more or less right. Just that 1 molecule moving hardly makes temperature and one probably needs a large number.

yyyk2• 3 years ago

- The average movement of a solid is often zero, while its temperature is usually higher.

- Movement has an implied direction even if we ignore it sometimes. Temperature does not.

- A gas molecule can move a lot but have low temperature because it has little to collide with.

It's more accurate to talk about vibration/collisions rather than movement.

magicalhippo• 3 years ago

Touch is measuring motion or sustained pressure. Taste doesn't care about how hard the molecules hit your taste receptors, only if they bind to the taste receptors or not. Our eyes don't measure the photon pressure[1], the photons react with the atoms in our photoreceptor cells[2] triggering an electrochemical process.

Our sense of hearing is the closest to touch. We have hairs on our body which is part of our sense of touch, which react to motion and pressure, both from physical objects and the air around us.

Similarly the hairs in our ears react to the pressure waves of the air around us. However a big difference is that they're shielded by the ear drum and don't react to sustained pressure, only relatively high-frequency air pressure changes.

Why we call them different things is mostly because they're used for different tasks. An electrical generator and an electrical motor can be the same thing, it's just what it's used for.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radiation_pressure

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Visual_phototransduction

quietbritishjim2• 3 years ago

If you're going to categorise senses into the usual five, which is what seems to be going on here, then hot, cold and pain are going to count as "touch" too. Those aren't about measuring motion so this explanation doesn't seem to work.

aeturnum• 3 years ago

I recommend you check out An Immense world by Ed Yong - many senses are arguably 'touch tuned for something'. Though taste and smell and vision are not.

jraph• 3 years ago

I would say: for useful abstraction. Both when speaking about them in everyday life, and studying them.

IshKebab2• 3 years ago

Because that would be an incredibly useless categorisation of very different senses.

emrah• 3 years ago

They could be. We have words to describe the special types of touch so we can differentiate them

RugnirViking• 3 years ago

touch isn't one sense either. You have separate organs in the skin for high and low frequency vibrations, pressure, and more.

Merkel's disks (close to surface, sense edges and slight pressure) Meissner corpuscles (close to surface, sense fine vibrations) Pacinian corpuscles (Deep, sense low frequency vibrations and heavy pressure) Ruffini endings (Sense skin stretching)

Not to mention other touch-like senses like pain, heat/cold, and burns. There are also separate dedicated mechanisms for erogenous zones (Krause end-bulbs) Your brain does a fine job interpreting all of these together but they are totally different biological mechanisms

throwaway_ab• 3 years ago

Sure, any interaction between our bodies and the universe can be considered an interaction of touch.

All of our senses involve some form of matter/energy touching us.

- Photons touching our retina cells...

- Molecules touching our taste buds...

- Air molecules touching our ear hairs...

- Some amount of matter or electromagnetic energy touching our skin...

- Molecules touching our olfactory sensory neurons...

IMO we do not describe them as all just being touch as:

1) Saying they all are touch doesn't help differentiate the different senses and how they work.

2) It's a bit too low level.

This is similar to saying there is no need for the separate disciplines of biology & chemistry because it's all just physics after all. So we might as well dump those subjects completely.

Imagine being introduced to science at school but there is only one subject, physics, so you only "eventually" learn chemistry & biology through the lens of their physical atomic interactions.

Imagine trying to describe a cell through the frame of atomic interactions and no higher level abstractions allowed.

All science being physics is far less useful than being able to step over the base level going's on and make higher level abstractions so that you work at the appropriate "topology/focus/subdivision" level for the scientific discipline in question.

Anyways that's what I thought of when considering all senses are touch, it's just a bit too low level and ambiguous to be useful.

aspenmayer• 3 years ago

“The map is not the territory.”

- Alfred Korzybski

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Map%E2%80%93territory_relation

Propelloni• 3 years ago

You might enjoy reading Hermann von Helmholtz' and Ernst Mach's writings on sensory perception. If you do, you could do worse then to continue to read up on category philosophy. A seminal work would be Kant's Critique of Pure Reason.

truculent• 3 years ago

Because all those things feel different to touch

Ensorceled4• 3 years ago

This may sound like a dumb question but can anyone explain to me why our senses are not all just considered touch?

It is a dumb question. How would categorizing all our senses as "sense of touch" be in anyway useful? Why would we categorize obviously different things that work entirely differently as the same because, "at the end of the day, everything is atoms"

"Did you lose both your sense of touch and your sense of touch when you got COVID?"

"No, I thankfully, I only lost my sense of touch."

dotnet00• 3 years ago

Sort of reminds me of the argument that nothing can be artificial because we, as natural beings are making said things and thus following the chain, everything is technically originated from nature.

It's technically correct and does highlight that calling something artificial doesn't make it inherently inferior to something natural, but if we extended the meaning of natural like that, the term artificial would become meaningless while the need to distinguish between the "naturalness" of a CPU vs a plant would remain.

xkcd-sucks• 3 years ago

but can anyone explain to me why our senses are not all just considered touch

s/considered/named/ , if everything were called "touch" then we'd need new language to differentiate between stuff interacting with visible light, air pressure waves, etc. \

The other question is can the sense of "touch" be broken down further? And the answer is yes, there are distinct "sense of touch" systems that measure different kinds of movement (stretching, low frequency vibration, high frequency vibration, ...) and these are used in ways that may be surprising (e.g. feeling details of a surface is mediated more through vibrations than by "displacement/distance" type senses)

also for building practical intuition, they can be temporarily turned off via adaptation - i.e. hold on to something vibrating at 20Hz for a few minutes, now you've blown out the Meissner's Corpuscle / low freq system while retaining the others

Some intro material below

    - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Somatosensory_system
    - https://pressbooks.umn.edu/sensationandperception/chapter/mechanoreceptors-draft/
    - https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/neuroscience/mechanoreceptor                    
    - chapters are on scihub: https://sci-hub.se/https://doi.org/10.1016/B978-1-4377-2411-0.00024-1

goodbyesf• 3 years ago

Molecules touch your nose and you smell things. Air vibrates your inner ear hairs and you hear things. Photons hit your eyes and you see things (not sure if this counts but it seems like it could).

You can see things in the dark with your eyes closed, you can hear things in a vacuum sealed isolation chamber, you can smell things without any there being anything smelly and you can feel things without touching anything.

Rather than every sense being touch, every sense seems mental.

_el1s7• 3 years ago

Don't confuse the word touching, or when two things get in contact, with the actual human sense of "touch".

You don't smell and see through your hand, do you...

darkflame91• 3 years ago

Roald Dahl wrote a short story, 'The Sound Machine' that's on very similar lines. Looks like it can be found in its entirety here: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1949/09/17/the-sound-mach...

euroderf• 3 years ago

Oh wow. I've been trying to find that story for decades but couldn't remember title or author. I read it as a teenager and it left an impression. Thank you for posting!

endorphine• 3 years ago

Perhaps a better title would be: "Plants can detect sound".

jingles_dev• 3 years ago

In my studies, we place EEG electrode on them, they produce different amount of electrical signals in different conditions too.

pbhjpbhj2• 3 years ago

Piezoelectric sensors can hear! /s

signa112• 3 years ago

in this regard, i am always reminded of pioneering (in true sense of that word) work of jagdish-chandra-bose (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jagadish_Chandra_Bose).

it truly is fascinating !

jamiek88• 3 years ago

Ahem, that is Sir Jagdesh.

signa112• 3 years ago

ah yes, ofcourse ! i stand corrected...

patrickscoleman2• 3 years ago

Just read “The Day of the Triffids” by John Wyndham (1951)[1]. It’s a great, classic horror sci-fi novel where plants can hear and talk to each other. Big influence for “Annihilation” and “28 Days Later.” Gotta love it when some crazy fictional idea turns out to have some factual (?) basis.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Day_of_the_Triffids

kilolima2• 3 years ago

I think Annihilation is more a shameless remake of Stalker, as far as going into a "Zone" where an alien influence has changed the nature of reality.

tsimionescu3• 3 years ago

I wouldn't say Annihilation is in any way a remake of Stalker, shameless or not. It is clearly inspired by it a bit in terms of setting, but it has a very different message to say. Stalker was essentially a movie about faith. Annihilation is a movie about self-destruction, both in the destructive sense, but also as a necessary step to building a new self.

The concept of a special zone where things are not the same as in normal reality is merely a shared motif.

rocketbop• 3 years ago

Annihilation reminded me of Ballard’s The Crystal World in which all living things are slowly but surely being consumed.

gavinmckenzie• 3 years ago

I thought the accepted explanation of Annihilation was a metaphor for cancer. The slow seemingly unstoppable spread. Mutations creating new things that mimic the familiar but in often grotesque ways, mechanistically expanding to destructively consume everything in its path into a new form of life.

throw0101b• 3 years ago

The move Annihilation was based on the book of the same name (first of a trilogy):

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Annihilation_(VanderMeer_novel...

barrysteve• 3 years ago

Similar structure, yes.

The questions about the realness of the Zone and the motives of the characters, allowed for much deeper and broader implications.

Annihilation was more specific and overlapped too much with explicit pre-existing myth(s), to be a remake of Stalker.

saberience• 3 years ago

I thought Annihilation is more of a re-thinking of HP Lovecrafts story "The Colour out of Space". You should totally read it, it's fantastically creepy and clearly influenced the film.

IshKebab2• 3 years ago

I was reading about this last week and the thing that struck me is that every experiment was "plants respond more to <musical genre> than <other musical genre>", or male voices vs female voices or swearing vs compliments.

It's total pseudoscience designed to generate comedy science articles and press releases.

If anyone actually cared about this they'd be playing sine waves and white noise at various frequencies and amplitudes. You'd see a graph of growth vs frequency or whatever.

I couldn't find anything like that though. Does this article have it (can't read due to paywall).

lacrimacida• 3 years ago

Science for clicks

xbmcuser• 3 years ago

I guess this answers the question If a Tree Falls in the Forest and There's No One Around to Hear It, Does It Make a Sound? yes the trees do hear it.

sebmellen• 3 years ago

Mother Earth's Plantasia — warm earth music for plants and the people who love them

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SZkR3PyHTs0

belter2• 3 years ago

Why the change in the title? It is not the original and there is nothing clikbaity about it. Is HN now editorializing the Economist?

lmpdev• 3 years ago

Concision?

Ensorceled4• 3 years ago

The "plants don't have ears" part of the original title was, at best, unnecessarily folksy.

belter2• 3 years ago

Guidelines say: "Otherwise please use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait; don't editorialize."

qlm• 3 years ago

Boquila trifoliolata appears to mimic surrounding leaves and the mechanism is currently unknown. One (controversial) hypothesis is that it has some sort of vision.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boquila

unsupp0rted• 3 years ago

One hypothesis is that volatile organic compounds emitted from host plant leaves induce a phenotypic change in nearby B. trifoliolata leaves. By receiving different host signals into its system, it is able to create specific signals and hormones in its tissues to regulate gene transcription of leaf morphology and developmental pathways for leaf differentiation.[12] The other hypothesis is that there could be horizontal gene transfer between the host and B. trifoliolata. A separate study also conducted by Gianoli et al. suggests that bacterial agents, which could mediate a horizontal gene transfer, may play a role in leaf mimicry by B. trifoliolata.

See, here are two perfectly reasonable explanations for the mimicry that don't involve "seeing" anything.

A 2021 paper suggested that the plant has some sort of vision using ocelli. This hypothesis was presented on the basis of experiments in which the vine appeared to mimic plastic vines and artificial plants.

Plastic vines and artificial plants too!? There go those two theories.

ChainOfFools• 3 years ago

shadow patterns and reflected light from nearby leaves or leaf- like bits of plastic as signals perhaps?

LoveMortuus• 3 years ago

Paper on the experiment, where they test if the plant will mimic the leaves of an artificial plastic plant: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8903786/

Quite a read, I hope others replicate the study, because this is fascinating. If we're able to really point in the direction that the plant uses vision to mimic other plants leaves (even artificial plant), I wonder how that vision works!

dncornholio• 3 years ago

There should have been multiple types mimic-leaves because we cannot rule out this is the plants normal growth.

Also should have let the plant grow without any mimic leaves and with an actually growing plant.

monlockandkey• 3 years ago

Wow this is insane. I wonder if this could have real world application?

fellowmartian• 3 years ago

Plant-based surveillance cameras, obviously.

dtjb• 3 years ago

"This is a deeply flawed article based on a poorly designed experiment and reflects significant author bias in the interpretation of the results,” wrote Washington State University horticultural physiologist Linda Chalker-Scott in a blog post earlier this year.

https://www.the-scientist.com/news-opinion/can-plants-see-in...

Aerroon• 3 years ago

Plants having some form of vision doesn't that extraordinary of an idea to me. They can clearly detect light because of photosynthesis. Plants will also grow/turn towards the light. Ie they have a way to detect light. It doesn't seem that crazy to me that they could have some mutation that uses the information the plant gets from light.

pvaldes4• 3 years ago

pseudoscience, unability to apply the most basic self-criticism [1], and low quality papermills churning turd-ticles in action.

[1] Stop reading at "Plants living near a busy road have their grow stunt because noise", that is just the dumbest explanation available in the bag. Do they noticed that those areas are typically contaminated with heavy metals?

Ensorceled4• 3 years ago

pseudoscience, unability to apply the most basic self-criticism [1], and low quality papermills churning turd-ticles in action.

This eloquently and entirely refutes all the claims, excellent work.

yojo• 3 years ago

That’s not what the article said. Verbatim quote (emphasis mine):

“…marigolds and sage plants exposed to the noise of traffic from a busy motorway suffered stunted growth”

There’s a link in the article with more details on the experimental design:

“The plants were grown from seed and allowed to mature for two months in the same space before they were divided into two groups. One group was exposed to 73 decibels of traffic noise recorded from a busy motorway in Tehran for 16 hours a day. The other group was left to grow in silence. After 15 days had passed, samples were taken from the youngest fully expanded leaves on every plant in the experiment and studied.”

The plants were exposed to sound in a lab, with a control group. They were not actually next to a motorway.

pvaldes4• 3 years ago

Evolving that system still does not have sense from neither a biological point of view, nor from a common sense. This came from the (incorrect) assumption than nature is quiet.

Exactly the opposite to what we can empirically observe: The tallest, fast growing plants live in extremely loudly places called rainforests. Only the ocean is louder

73Db is a joke. Many of the animals here are incredibly loud. Common coqui frogs sing all night long at 90 Db, 20,000 frogs in each hectare. The place is filled with cicadas, Howling Monkeys, and Wild Red fowl roosters competing to be the most annoying thing. Cotinga birds and friends sing at 110-125 Db!. non stop, by day... Do we think that plants care about that? They couldn't grow faster.

amelius• 3 years ago

Ok, so I wonder if my plants would do better if I recorded jungle sounds and played them back when I'm not at home.

hutzlibu• 3 years ago

There were quite some experiments in that direction, but using music. I don't recall the name or have a link to such a study at hand (and I do question and never researched how scientific it was done) but the plants seemed to prefer Ravi Shankar instead of Heavy Metal.

adyashakti• 3 years ago

this is old news. we were doing experiments with plants and music back in the 1960s. but nobody liked our results because we found that modern styles are toxic, and ancient vedic sacred chants are the most nourishing sound vibrations.

yieldcrv3• 3 years ago

next up: plants suffer and try to avoid suffering, vegans die out due to inability to reduce suffering or move the goal post to something selfishly convenient just like everyone else.

just a matter of time.

petemir• 3 years ago

Surely this study has been funded by the meat industry.

hombre_fatal• 3 years ago

It should be a red flag when you're hoping for huge shake-up discoveries in the future to justify your behavior today.

yieldcrv3• 3 years ago

I believe plants are valid organisms that avoid negative stimuli and that this undermines 'suffer' based consumption arguments

There are other plant consumption / meat avoidance preferences I am completely fine with

0daystock• 3 years ago

Flawed argument because animals still eat 10x the amount of plants vegans do. So if plant suffering was a legitimate concern, one would still be vegan, which is a lifestyle to reduce harm to animals.

yieldcrv3• 3 years ago

there are plenty of reasons to be avoid eating meat that have nothing to do with reducing harm to animals.

and animals consuming plants has nothing to do with any of your observations. If this was a standardized test prompt, your first sentence would be erroneous information.

adolph• 3 years ago

This post definitely needs a link to the wonderful book by Ed Yong, An Immense World. Given all that even simple animals can sense and affect, it is not surprising that plants will hold further sensory surprises.

https://www.amazon.com/Immense-World-Animal-Senses-Reveal/dp...

Modified3019• 3 years ago

As an aside, insects often use their feet to “hear” vibrations from the plant they are standing on, allowing them to seemingly “silently” communicate with others on that plant by transmitting vibrations through it, or detect when an animal is coming along.

Notably in my experience, corn rootworm beetle were especially adept at hearing me walking along through corn and hiding before there was any possibility of seeing me. I’d have to stop and be still for a minute for them to start crawling about again.

mecsred• 3 years ago

I understand that this is probably my ignorance making me kind of an ass here, but my gut response is "obviously?". They're pressure waves, literally forces acting directly on the plant! Imagine reporting that plants can grow differently if you grab them and yank them around a bit every once in a while.

bobbiechen• 3 years ago

I think it's interesting to contrast to vision/light: similarly, there is a physical effect which we can perceive "from a distance". But vision varies wildly even among animals, and there are plenty of wavelengths of light that we can't perceive. I enjoyed a brief discussion of this in Andy Weir's The Martian (no spoilers here).

carapace• 3 years ago

There was an experiment where a scientist (I think it was Pask) built a cybernetic chemical machine in a petri dish. When the requirement to respond to sound was introduced, the machine grew "ears": spines of different lengths (that therefore vibrated at different resonant frequencies like the hairs in the inner ear.) (One of the most fascinating and terrifying experiments ever conducted IMO.)

Then there was the famous case of the program optimized by genetic programming that wouldn't function correctly on any but the FPGA it was evolved on; the program had adapted itself to idiosyncrasies of the hardware that were invisible on the level of the specification.

Just as Lord Kelvin's Thunderstorm evolves an electric charge so evolution, uh, evolves whatever potentialities are there and adaptive.

In sum, duh. Of course plants are sensitive to sound. The contradictory hypothesis would be that there's nothing useful to plants in their soundscape. And doesn't that sound obviously silly?

kderbyma• 3 years ago

Another obvious article....they make it too which was a lot more of an announcement. this is assumed by many people....notice how loud traffic affects Plants

Plants can detect sound

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