How do trees and plants communicate? Do they do it? sorry if it sounds stupid or not the right place to ask
How do trees and plants communicate? Do they do it? sorry if it sounds stupid or not the right place to ask
How do trees and plants communicate? Do they do it? sorry if it sounds stupid or not the right place to ask
online mycelia networking forums
like 3chan
Sound: https://www.cell.com/cell/fulltext/S0092-8674(23)00262-3
ty for the link.
electrical fields and chemical signatures
Plants send metabolites into their rhizosphere. When they're attacked by pests or disease those metabolites include defense chemicals. If another plant takes up those chemicals from a shared rhizosphere or mycorrhizal network then that plant will produce it's own defense chemicals preemptively. That's about it for plant communication. Mycorrhizal networks will also act as source/sink networks which move nutrients and sugar from where they're abundant to where they are scarce, but that's not really communication.
>rhizosphere
I already knew about this concept but I didn't know the word for it. Thanks anon. Not OP though
No problem.
>That's about it for plant communication
What about this?
I don't think plants use that to communicate. The paper is about using this phenomenon to detect stress in greenhouses. If they do communicate that way then it's less effective than the metabolites
reasonable
I know this will sound ignorant but plants are too different from other living beings
They have a "neural network" that works kinda like in animals. Part of their vascular system, the phloem, is made of connected living cells enclosed in a cell membrane. Ion pumps keep the inside depolarized at about -170mV. If a stimulus like an injury, heat or cold is applied, ion channels open, the vellsel depolarized and the signal is propagated down. Then it slowly repolarizes again. Same thing as an action potential in an animal neuron, just slower. Depolarization takes a couple seconds, repolarization a few minutes. Effectively, this gives every plant a kind of neural system from the tip of every root to every leaf.
A few even use this to move, like venus flytraps shutting on an insect and mimosas folding their leafs when touched.
interesting. some plants are responsive to classic pavlovian training, implying plants have some form of basic memory. Would ion pumps serve this function?
Haven't heard that one before. You remember where you saw that?
It makes sense though. If plants have a kind of neural network, you can reinforce certain pathways through repeated stimuli and those get reinforced, forming a faster and stronger reaction to stimuli.
They'll turn their leaves in the same direction of other plants. Even if they're plastic plants, they'll mimic the plastic plants, implying plants have some form of vision. Which makes sense considering a huge amount of their surface area is made of light sensors.
That's pretty interesting
goddamn seeing these absolute units makes my dick so hard, love the sequoias
Unironically fungus. It's the most interesting thing that biology has discovered in the last decade. There's highways of fungus in the soil connecting all plant life. But you knew this that's why you asked the question.
They don't in a human sense. Almost all organisms have no behavior that could be genuinely considered anthropomorphic.
It makes more sense when you consider that all biological regulation works on the basis of balancing internal and external states. Animals happened to go down a path that provides a lot more interface with externalities.
We're used to thinking about behaviors and communication as they apply to ourselves and familiar animals, which is strongly tied to the food chain. So much of their life is finding food or avoiding being eaten.
Plant behavior and communication falls along the same lines except it is optimized for a situation where movement isn't an option. So it's all about small responses to whatever is happening with all the bugs and microbes and neighboring plant species. Just like in animal behaviors, different plants evolved different strategies for this. We're constantly discovering them but it's kind of boring and doesn't get much press.
plants can communicate through hormones or and other volatile chemical reactants based on seasonal changes in the local climate.
In some regards, you have trees that autovegatativly clone themselves, so are able to develop super organism groves of the same tree.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pando_(tree)
Also, since soil is the medium in which plants develop from, trees and plants can develop enzymes which can change the ph of the local growth medium to gain more nutrients based on growth cycles.
In terms of dispersion and other components of leaf via the stroma, or florescence through flowering, plant pollen and other concentration of gases can mediate the metabolic activity of a plant..