My phone also screams (signals) when someone calls, must mean my phone feels pain I guess.
By contrast, stressed plants are much noisier, emitting an average up to around 40 clicks per hour depending on the species. And plants deprived of water have a noticeable sound profile. They start clicking more before they show visible signs of dehydrating, escalating as the plant grows more parched, before subsiding as the plant withers away.
someone smarter than me should get to inventing a device that listens to plant clicks and tells you when it needs water
Might be a good use-case to have your home irrigation system be triggered by plant clicks instead of a schedule.
It could be. Although we don’t know how much those sounds indicate distress, and perhaps watering should happen much sooner.
Imagine if aliens abduct you and give you food only when your stomach makes the kind of noise it makes after three days without eating anything, because “that’s all they can detect.”
Well hence they will work out when the plant (or human in your example) is really starving.
Remember that Mythbusters (Episode 61 Deadly Straw) that re-created Cleve Backster’s primary perception experiments to show plants can sense malicious intent and totally re-created his results? I had to re-watch it to make sure I was remembering correctly. They totally just alter the experiment until they break it, then sweep it under the rug and call it busted. Totally.
So it’s been years since I’ve seen it, but I do remember that episode. I went through the wiki a bit and read up on some of Backster’s experiments and how they were received by the scientific community… not great. It is a very intriguing subject, but I think it gets anthropomorphized pretty bad. Even the title here, “plants do scream” almost implies consciousness. I do think there are mechanisms that plants may have evolved that we don’t fully understand. Like holding onto water or nutrients if there are more plant clicks (screams) happening nearby. But we have to be scientific about this. In the article, they talk about possible sources of the clicks possibly being air bubbles escaping the plant. Jumping to some of the conclusions that were explored in the past like “plants have ESP” are tall claims. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. Claims like that were never reproducible, so we shouldn’t believe them. I think plants are amazing, and we should keep studying stuff like this, but best to stay realistic and phrase these findings appropriately. Just my two cents.
Hasn’t this study been done before? Feel like I’ve heard of grass “distress signals” from years back
Yes, remember that one as well, but this is a literal sound, not only a “plants communicate stress in some way” (if I remember the previous research correctly).
For me the question is if plants can actually hear these distress sounds, otherwise it’s not really for communication.
