Plants Do Communicate
An article on Physorg.com talks about recent research on plants revealing networking systems much like the internet that help their survival.
Many herbal plants such as strawberry, clover, reed and ground elder naturally form networks. Individual plants remain connected with each other for a certain period of time by means of runners. These connections enable the plants to share information with each other via internal channels.
To demonstrate, the site uses the examples of a caterpillar munching on a clover plant. The invaded plant sends an internal signal to the rest of the clover plants to step up their biochemical and mechanical defenses which make them less attractive to caterpillars resulting in significantly less damage.
From Ecological Understanding zoologist named Von Hoven was doing research on the cause of hundreds of deaths of antelope on an African game reserve. He determined that the culprit was tannin, a toxin found in the acacia leaves that the antelope fed on. During normal times the toxin is low and tolerated by the animals but he found when the trees were under stress, as in the four year drought they were experiencing, that the tannin increased.
He also found that when the acacia tree was being grazed upon they gave off increased ethylene which trees as much as fifty meters away sensed and within 30 minutes started increasing tannin in their leave. The tannin is unpleasant tasting and so grazers move on to other areas. In the stressed situation this probably worked as population control and survival of the tree species.
An article in Wikipedia a physicist, J C Bose, states that:
His research in plant stimuli were pioneering, he showed with the help of his newly invented crescograph that plants responded to various stimuli as if they had nervous systems like that of animals. He therefore found a parallelism between animal and plant tissues.
His experiments showed that plants grow faster in pleasant musical surroundings and its growth becomes retarded in areas with noise or harsh sound.
As if we didn’t have enough to worry about!
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