Flowers can actually hear bees ! They respond by increasing sugar concentrationin the nectar within minutes to attract it or the next ones that will come near.
onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/ele....Posted Nov 19, 2019, 11:26 PM UTC
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onlinelibrary.wiley.com
Flowers feelin those vibes.
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The same is true for the sound of insects eating. If plants hear a recording of a caterpillar chewing, they will start producing more chemical defences. Super Cool!
Reference: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s00442-014-2995-6
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What teases. Got the plants all wet with bee noises and then left them high and dry.
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See plants are intelligent life forms, and should be treated as such...vegans!
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I’m a vegetarian not because I like animals... but because I hate plants.
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I like you
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I actually tried to pronounce “concentrationin”
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It sounds like something but really is just my inability a spell words.
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Is the hormone responsible for focus
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Purify that stuff and sell it to me immediately.
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Gives new meaning to singing to your plants!
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Energy crazy bra
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I read in the book "The hidden life of trees" that experiments have shown a type of grass which were attracted to jazz music and would place itself to better receive the waves. So it seems plants can register sound AND can identify it, which is amazing.
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Well that’s fucking rad.
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Again, plants giving signals for why they are the superior life form lol (I'm not a botanist, to make it clear).
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Exactly what a botanist would say 🤔
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Legit tho plants have it mostly figured out
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A small but meaningful clarification--- flowers can detect sound from bees (and other sources) but this doesn't mean we have any evidence that they "hear" bees.
Saying that they "hear" sounds implies the plants are conscious and experiencing sounds as we experience sounds but this research doesn't and can't really point towards that being the case.
Alexa can detect sounds and respond accordingly but we don't have any reason to believe that Alexa is conscious and experiencing sounds.
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They do hear. Vibration of the air are detected and processed into internal signals of another nature. Our own internal signals are mostly calcium channels opening up, here it's probably some other chemical reaction, but it's fundamentally similar in my opinion. The outside sounds left a "trace" into the internal state of the system.
Now is that experience actually experienced as we would ? Certainly not. Does it map this input into a mental model somewhere, very probably not as well. But I don't think hearing implies consciousness at all.
Or rather I have a looser definition of consciousness, since I don't see why a nervous system, and even less a complex one, would be necessary. Panpsychism all the way here, I'm not at all an emergentist. I don't see a fundamental difference between a neuron and some other cellular processing unit, nor do I see a difference (of nature) between stacking 30 neurons and stacking 30 billions of them. Of course, consciousness may refine itself, so to speak, when it has more processing cells to work with, but appear altogether ? That's certainly something that I would question.
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No. Hearing is a sensation that requires a nervous system. If I sever your auditory nerve, you will stop having the sensation of hearing even though your body will respond to many forms of vibration still. You are using magical thinking to anthropomorphise plants.
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But if you cut the mechanoreceptors that will translate this signal into a physiological reaction in the plant, the reaction will disappear as well. And not all vibrations are "heard", this is specific to one sensory organ and information processing pathway. If you cut it down, the flower will also still respond to other mechanic stresses, but no longer acoustic waves.
And we generally call the ability to sense and react to acoustic waves "hearing".
At the risk of it looking like a "no u" argument, I feel like I am taking the less magical path. You are operating under a model in which the nerves transmit the signal to an inner core, basically a soul, although you might call it brain or consciousness, and this core will actually "experience" the stimulus.
I believe in no such things. I see no difference between ions crossing the membrane and depolarizing it versus phytohormones crossing plasmodesmata. I mean here's obviously differences, my point is though, i don't why we should consider quick rapid membrane depolarization as a particular route to consciousness.
Apart from the fact that neurons are a very scalable, parallelizable and efficient way of treating information that is. Of course considering that, animals will experience things with exponentially more nuances. But this is not a difference of nature, just a difference of degree (albeit a very large one).
Cause if 1 neuron isn't conscious, why are 86 billions conscious ? This must mean that consciousness is an emergent property. Which immediately begs the question : at which point does it emerges.
You can do a lot of philosophy on this. Long story short, i think emergentism has a lot of problems, and think the opposite stand point is more sound. The two opposite ones actually : either everything (down to elementary particules) is conscious or nothing is. Either way we are conscious in the same way as anything else. Because we combine so many moving parts though, we are certainly able to feel in a lot more ways than a plant, with feeling on top of feelings on top of feelings.
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Complete bs. Move on hippies.
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I do feel like it is the opposite standpoint that is essentially religious. Otherwise you need some sort of core that will actually "experience" the sensory data as opposed to, let's say, a blind machine that automatically reacts to stimuli.
This is basically Descartes, one of the first to say that you could study the human body with physics, that the laws of physics applied to humans as well. Buuuuut fell short of the consciousness stuff : sure plants and animals are blind automatons, but we humans have consciousness, since we have a soul given by God.
Which is basically the argument made by the guy above, albeit caricatured (I'd say boiled down to the essential parts). Today we might extend to special thing to primates or animals that pass the mirror test or whatever, but it's essentially the same thing.
The thing is, Spinoza answered this a long time ago : their is no special place for humanity in the Universe or in God's plan or whatever. Nor do animals for that matter. Our molecules of carbon actually don't become conscious once inside our magic body. Therefore, either everything is conscious or nothing is, either way it's the same for everything.
Once the only rational conclusion has been reached, the door is open to scientific inquiries about how are stimuli processed in any given system.
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what does it mean to "be conscious" and "experience" the sound?
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Thank you for pointing this out
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Hummingbirds also make a strange scratchy and very distinctive sound in their call (check out in Merlin Bird ID) . Wonder if this sound also causes increased sugars in nectar?
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The interesting thing is, they only tested one flower, who has two pollinators, a moth and bees, and it reacts to both. But it remains to be seen how common this mechanism is.
But I know for example that some plants pollinated by bats have leaves shaped to reflect ultrasound very well. The leaf acts as a bacon allowing the bat to notice and locate the tree much more easily.
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Very cool stuff :)
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Also, could this be adversely affecting plants near roadways, artificially forcing plants to increase sugars when a car engine sound happens to be at a similar frequency to a bee? - But not actually assisting the plant with pollination...?
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That's one possibility that the researchers put forward in any case. But it remains to be tested somehow.
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My favorite article on vegans is them loving avocados...the fruit that relies on bees...an animal to produce... lol
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I mean, at this point most of everything (i think it's estimated to be around 80% or something) requires pollination by animals. But if it's doing its thing happily, then why not ? The question would be how disruptive to the animals it is to mass farm avocados for exemple.
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Yeah I definitely see that. It’s like how many of the (organic foods) come from 3rd world countries using animals for labor. I know some places in Vietnam use oxen for rice paddies still. But you know I just wish if people were going to make life choices on morals be all the way or not at all.
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Though I'd argue there are very few (if any) moral system that is 100% full proof, and virtually nobody lives according to their own principles all the time. You always have to make compromises at some point. It makes the preachers look all the more irritating, but if we're being honest, in this day and age, nobody has any fucking clue about the entirety of its impact on the world, nor even the means to know them eventually.
The system is, well, global. We rely on networks spanning the entire world, multiple language zones, trade routes, borders... And then some things that are not problematic in small scale become huge problems if they are scaled up. It's a mess.
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I like the nobody has a fucking clue part. You’re 100% right. And get some people make the change to try to make steps towards being better. I.E. getting an electric car it’s a small thing but it’s still better than nothing. Lol
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The reaction is seen when the researchers have played back sound of a flying bee, or sound signals at similar frequencies. When playing frequencies too different from those of a bee, the increase in sugar concentration is not seen. On a mechanistic level, they noted that the petals vibrate at frequency similar to that of a bee, suggesting both that :
the petals are the sensors of the actual sound. Vibration could be picked up by mechanoreceptors, common in plants for a variety of phenomenon.
the shape, thickness and geometry of the petals has been selected to resonate with the pollinator's sound frequency.
This selective increase in sugar concentration has two main advantages over constant high-concentration :
It saves energy for the plant
it reduces bacterial load in the nectar, bacteria that would otherwise consume the sugar.
The results suggest that plants may be sensible to sound, and may be disturbed by the sounds human activities make if it is within a certain range.
I don't understand what "sound frequency" is because I thought sound was a frequency, if that makes sense. Do they just mean sound?
Everything is in frequency. Sound frequency is a measure of the sound wave. Frequency is simply put the speed of something going on and off. A high frequency will over the span of a second turn on and off more than a low frequency. Sounds are air waves, if you imagine the peak of the sound wave as on and the valley as off then a high frequency noise will have more peaks and valleys than a low frequency noise as you've probably seen on graphs.
The pitch, if this makes more sense. Low frequency means low pitch, high frequency means high pitch, and if you want to see this effect, you must play a sound at the right pitch. For example, the flower will not react to the sound of a mosquito flying, as it is too high compared to the bee sound. Nor to the chirps of a bat's echolocation.
Sound is not a frequency; that doesn't make sense. Allow me to elaborate:
A frequency is a mathematical construct representing occurrences per time. The only things that are frequencies are mathematical quantities with units of 1/time (e.g. 5Hz is "5 per second"). It is the inverse of a period (e.g. a period of 5sec, f=1/T, 5Hz=1/(5sec))
Sound is the physiological interpretation of vibrational energy which has been carried across a medium. A sound wave is thus basically a function f(t) of arbitrary shape. A sine wave (sin, cos) is in some sense the purest sound you can hear, just listen to it on youtube.
Sounds have the property of superposition: if two people are talking in a room and generate two waveforms f1(t) and f2(t), our ears hear f1(t)+f2(t). If f1 and f2 were weird squiggles flowing along the time-axis, f1+f2 would just be the sum of those squiggles. But how would your brain separate them?
Sounds in nature are incredibly complex; the background noise you hear in nature is the superposition of millions of small things.
Linear signals like sounds may be mathematically thought of as decomposed into frequencies. This is known as the Fourier transform. This means that any sound, nomatter how complicated, may be decomposed into an infinite sum of frequencies. This also obeys a law of superposition. Intuitively if we have a high-pitched whistle F1(frequency) and a low-pitched hum F2(frequency), we can plot both as a histogram-like function over frequencies (instead of over t). We're in the weird shadow-world of frequency space. The high-pitched whistle has stuff around 5kHz or more, the low-pitched hum may have humps around maybe 500Hz. When they add, the histograms sum in frequency space F1(freq)+F2(freq), just like the f1(t)+f2(t). If F1 and F2 were humps in the frequency domain, F1+F2 would be two humps in the frequency domain. When you hear these sounds, it's obvious which is which: the higher-pitched lump is the whistle, and the lower-pitched hump is the hum. (In reality, your brain does much more complicated things to distinguish speakers.)
To get a better feel for this, you look up *spectrograms* on youtube. e.g. here's a music-theory (not mathematical) video on spectrograms. When I talk about frequency functions F(freq) etc., I'm talking about vertical slices of these spectrograms. These spectrograms show how the *frequency domain* changes with time (a vertical slice would be a plot of the frequency domain at a particular point in time), as opposed to *waveform* (f(t)) which you might see on an oscilloscope, a heartbeat monitor, or an EKG, which we said before are in the time domain.
So, we can say that "sound is composed of component frequencies" (literally, in that you could consider it to be the sum of an infinite number of sine functions of different frequency, and figuratively, in that we humans hear in a perceptual space that's quite similar to the frequency domain).
bass = a low frequency sound
treble = a high frequency sound
bees buzzing = a unique combination of high, low and middle frequency sounds in different volumes that sounds like a bees buzz
the bees buzz contains mostly mid-to-high frequency sound content, so plants don't respond to bass as much as they do to higher frequency sounds.