That Clicking Sound You Hear? It’s Your Plants Talking To Each Other.
Okay, now is the time to start getting really worried. It’s bad enough that not only are we looking toward the end of mankind thanks to some silly Mayan calendar and that we could be on the verge of a zombie apocalypse but it seems that our plants are actually talking to each other.
Just think, every time you go and pick that rose for your sweetheart or prune back that wild ivy they are letting the whole plant world know the cruelty that is being done to them.
Think I’m going off the deep end eh?
Well check this out, it seems that a scientist by the name of Monica Gagliano at the Exeter University has discovered that all those previously thought to be silent plants actually are communicating with each other using clicking sounds.
Along with fellow scientists Stefano Mancuso and Daniel Robert she used some very powerful acoustic equipment they could hear clicking sounds coming from the roots of corn saplings.
Gagliano and her team concluded that plants are indeed communicating with each other by making clicking sounds that travel easily through soil. It’s thought that, like the methyl jasmonate, these signals are warning of incoming threats.
The discovery shows that the role of sound in plants, a field of study referred to as bioacoustics, has yet to be fully explored and understood. It’s quite possible, notes Gagliano, that some form of sensitivity to sound and vibrations may also play an important role in the life of plants.
via io9
You can find their complete paper on this at Trends in Plant Science
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About the Author
Steven Hodson Steven has been around the tech world long enough to see most of the stuff we think of cool happen before which leads to a certain bit of cynicism that has contributed to him being known as the cranky old fart of the Internet. Besides sharing some of the goodness that he finds with you here at 42x you can also find him curating some digital goodness at Winextra (tech type stuff) and Rotten Gumdrops (for your daily dose of WTF).
