>“As to why plants would need to panic when it rains, strange as it sounds, rain is actually the leading cause of disease spreading between plants,” said University of Western Australia’s Professor Harvey Millar, co-author of the study.
“When a raindrop splashes across a leaf, tiny droplets of water ricochet in all directions. These droplets can contain bacteria, viruses, or fungal spores.”
“The sick leaves can act as a catapult and in turn spread smaller droplets with pathogens to plants several feet away. It is possible that the healthy plants close by want to protect themselves,
1628 days ago [-]
kris-s 1629 days ago [-]
What is described in the article doesn't fit the definition of panic.
I'm torn because maybe I wouldn't have read the article without the needless anthropomorphization. Plants are awesome and interesting to me because they're so planty and not animaly.
NeedMoreTea 1628 days ago [-]
Give The Hidden Life of Trees by Peter Wohlleben a read and you might have to blur the border between the two. Highly recommended though - it's a marvellous read and very enlightening.
Ok, we'll give you some scare quotes to get some ironic detachment in the title above.
1628 days ago [-]
dickeytk 1629 days ago [-]
A defense mechanism that is triggered by a hormone? Doesn't seem terribly far off
dmurray 1628 days ago [-]
Almost every biological reaction is triggered or mediated by a hormone. I'd expect "panic" to mean a reaction that makes the plant more alert or able to act faster.
droithomme 1628 days ago [-]
He makes an interesting point. Some plants have a response to rain triggered by a hormone. To ascribe the term panic to it though might possibly be mischaracterizing the response because of the tendency to anthropomorphize.
nkrisc 1628 days ago [-]
Well we don't really have words to describe plant behavior. I agree, we can't view plants through an animalian lense, but at the same time we have to use the words we have to discuss them. I think it's fair to say plant "panic" is different than animal "panic" but from what I read, panic seems to be the closest analogue.
phkahler 1628 days ago [-]
Is our immune response to a pathogen considered panic? I think not.
jadell 1628 days ago [-]
A chemical reaction that sets of a string of defensive protection reactions and behaviors? Sounds quite like panic to me. It's basically "fight or flight" for plants except plants can't do the "flight" part.
narag 1628 days ago [-]
Panic is not the same as fear. Panic (insert here mythological reference to god Pan) is a kind of fear that causes uncontrolled, irrational and often counterproductive behaviour. Is that the case?
jcranberry 1627 days ago [-]
'uncontrolled and irrational' is only a bad thing in the context of human rationality and self control. plants obviously do not have such a thing--all their actions are primal and unmoderated. So panic for a plant would probably mean something like an immediate response to adverse stimuli, with an immediate and short-term goal of self-preservation.
lonelappde 1626 days ago [-]
"panic" means to react in a counterproductive way because fear overwhelms.
It's different from a mere adrenal response that has short term gain at long term risk.
Adrenaline makes you jump higher. Panic makes you jump off a cliff.
danharaj 1628 days ago [-]
On the other hand, we have many primal and ancient behaviors that can be contextualized on evolutionary timescales so that it can be reasonably said that, yea, a lot of our behaviors have common heritage with even plants.
samvher 1628 days ago [-]
Except our last common ancestor with plants was single celled so we’re unlikely to share many multicellular behaviors. Commonalities will be sub-cellular.
danharaj 1628 days ago [-]
Unicellular life has stress responses too.
BurningFrog 1628 days ago [-]
Except "panic" means an ultimately self destructive overreaction.
At least in my personal dictionary.
quixoticelixer- 1628 days ago [-]
Not all of us use your personal dictionary.
mikekchar 1628 days ago [-]
Are there times when "panic" is an appropriate response to something? I mean it is often an understandable response, but I have to agree that my understanding of the term is that is a response to being overwhelmed and responding haphazardly as a result. Is that an accurate description of what's happening? The actual article is a bit light to really understand. I wonder if it's the "chain reaction" across individual trees that is what they are describing as "panic".
coldtea 1628 days ago [-]
>Are there times when "panic" is an appropriate response to something?
Yes. When something is panic inducing.
Note that the bad connotations of panic are for not panic worthy situations (e.g. don't panic when you just lost your wallet, etc).
But when chased by a predator, a panic response is a good, and evolutionary created, way, to get from 0-60 mph adrenaline and speed wise...
A gazelle doesn't sit still and weigh the situation calmly. It panics and starts to run for its life...
pbhjpbhj 1628 days ago [-]
I think "panic" is a segment between realising you're in danger and responding, eg "running". Panic is when you know you need to respond quickly and come to a conclusion as to the best action, but you know you can't wait for your thought process to play through.
Once you decide to move, run (if that wasn't an instinctive response), then panic is over and action has ensued.
It's the "beachball of doom" bit that happens when the you spot the lion. Do I fight, or hide, or run, ... {computing best response, please wait} ... it's the wait in that parenthetical bit where your supervisory control systems say "argh, this is taking too long, in going to get eaten".
Surely?
The dictionary.com definition has it as "overwhelming fear that causes a sudden hysterical or irrational behaviour". Running from a predator is rational, or instinctive.
UnFleshedOne 1628 days ago [-]
By this definition panic can also be a instinctive (and rational) action -- sometimes just breaking paralysis and doing something is a statistically better than freezing in place. So it serves as an early interruption mechanism when the system doesn't have confidence that new solutions will be forthcoming in time to be useful.
Zenbit_UX 1628 days ago [-]
Couldn't disagree more with your definition, panicking is never a desirable action. Being chased by a predator and you run? Are humans likely the fastest animals? Most predators are much faster than us and would gladly give chase. The only way out is to outsmart it and you can't do that if you're panicking. The word itself carries an undesirable connotation and is never - by definition - the best course of action.
coldtea 1628 days ago [-]
>Couldn't disagree more with your definition, panicking is never a desirable action
Well, complains should be directed to evolution.
>Being chased by a predator and you run? Are humans likely the fastest animals?
Depends on the predator, for humans it will many times be other humans (or other homo species), and the extra boost panic mode gives you can very much help. Besides you don't have to merely run, you can run and hide, run and jump on some tree, etc.
>The only way out is to outsmart it and you can't do that if you're panicking.
You don't care much for outsmarting and subtle strategy when it's life or death either.
From Wikipedia:
"An evolutionary psychology explanation is that early animals had to react to threatening stimuli quickly and did not have time to psychologically and physically prepare themselves. The fight or flight response provided them with the mechanisms to rapidly respond to threats against survival."
If I come at you screaming with a knife would you sit and think how to outsmart me for a while, or start to panic / hide behind something / run trying to escape/avoid me? I'd like to see someone try the former...
>The word itself carries an undesirable connotation and is never - by definition - the best course of action
That's at the human cultural level, where it's 99.99% applied to non life-threatening situations, one should not worry as much about.
On the evolutionary/animal level, panic (aka fight or flight) is an excellent mechanism to stay alive...
undreren 1628 days ago [-]
Just because it is a hard to name a concrete situation, where panic is a good survival strategy for the individual, it can not be concluded that nature is not ripe with situations, where panic saves the flock.
Also, it would seem that the panic response is evolved for the benefit of the flock, not the individual, as it spreads rapidly; if one person panics, more will follow suit.
anoncake 1628 days ago [-]
If panic was never appropriate, the ability to panic either would never have developed or disappeared in humans a long time ago.
Firadeoclus 1628 days ago [-]
Only if it was sufficiently detrimental, and did not arise as a byproduct of other, evolutionarily beneficial changes.
If it had "disappeared in humans a long time ago" then that still implies a time when it existed. And if it could have existed, it could exist now.
mrfredward 1628 days ago [-]
The word "panic" is usually used to describe someone behaving irrationally. If you see a guy running from a lion, you don't say "he's panicking". If you see a guy pacing and sweating because he has to do his taxes, you do say "he's panicking". Many of the same biological mechanisms are at work, but the word is most commonly used when those mechanisms lead you astray.
hoseja 1628 days ago [-]
Say, when you are being chased by a lion.
not2personal 1628 days ago [-]
A fire. Its best to not casually stroll out of a building that is consumed in flames. A sense of urgency is helpful.
NeutronStar 1628 days ago [-]
Panic: a sudden overpowering fright
Fright: fear excited by sudden danger
...
Panic: a sudden overpowering fear excited by sudden danger
narag 1628 days ago [-]
Not all of us use your personal dictionary.
Well, that's unfortunate because his definition happens to be the right one.
BurningFrog 1628 days ago [-]
Give it time!
nkrisc 1628 days ago [-]
In my personal dictionary "panic" means "of or relating to pans" so clearly everyone in this thread is wrong.
erikpukinskis 1628 days ago [-]
Is there a term for the opposite of anthropomorphization? I.e. an unwillingness to acknowledge equivalencies between humans and other species due to a presumption of “human exceptionalism”?
las_balas_tres 1628 days ago [-]
I agree. The word "panic" to me implies a certain mental state. Something plants lack.
erikpukinskis 1628 days ago [-]
Given plants utilize electrical signals I don’t see how you could argue they don’t have “mental states”?
las_balas_tres 1622 days ago [-]
CPU's and other electronic devices utilize electrical signals. Do you think they have mental states ?
antonvs 1628 days ago [-]
...assuming panpsychism is not true.
sacrificedcapon 1628 days ago [-]
Perhaps that's why "panic" is in quotes.
Also keep in mind some believe that a lot of "animalyness" is also "plantyness".
The quotes were added later by dang, one of the moderators of HN.
1628 days ago [-]
codingdave 1628 days ago [-]
"Panic" is an anthropomorphism for what is really going on. Plants react to water. That makes complete sense. Humans react to it when it falls on us as well. Maybe we go inside. Maybe we open an umbrella. Maybe we go dance through the fields and enjoy a summer rain. But whatever we do, they are reactions, not "Panic."
Enginerrrd 1628 days ago [-]
While I mostly agree with you, I just want to play devil's advocate here a little bit.
Plants and fungi have some very complex interactive networks capable of various forms of individual, inter-individual, and inter-species communication and intelligent decision making. From our perspective though, these interactions and decisions play out over some very different time scales from our own cognition. Suppose for a second that a tree was intelligent enough to be sentient, it would be VERY difficult for either the tree or us to recognize the intelligence and cognition in the other.
"Panic" responses, fear, and the whole manner of physiologic changes that happen in a human didn't spring up over-night. These pathways evolved a VERY long time ago. An insect has some obvious "panic" type of responses to predation attempts that are not so different from our own. As you climb up the ladder in intelligence to mammals, and then all the way to humans, there is absolutely no clear line where "panic" suddenly exists as I believe you would define it. It's a very smooth and gradual transition. Even in a human, if you've ever watched one come back to consciousness after a seizure or wake up from anesthesia, you'll see that it's also a very smooth and gradual transition to what we'd call consciousness and sentience. It's not at all an on/off switch.
I wouldn't be at all surprised if some of the same neurotransmitters and hormones fill the same role in a plant response to dangerous conditions as they would humans. I know many of the same signalling molecules are in use. Evolution doesn't like to fix what ain't broke.
JoeAltmaier 1628 days ago [-]
Time scale isn't enough to prevent us from recognizing intelligence and cognition in trees (I can't speak for the trees recognizing us). Look at their works, their accomplishments, their cooperative social organization. They've had a long, long time to show us that.
Oh! They've done nothing! No tribes nor social exchanges - never even mention hospitals and lasers and money and law...
No, trees are not sentient, intelligent nor exhibiting cognition.
dmos62 1628 days ago [-]
You seem to use sentience as a synonym for human intelligence. Works, accomplishments, cooperation: if you don't see those things when you leave the city, you're (forgive the hyperbole) blind.
JoeAltmaier 1628 days ago [-]
Trees compete viciously for sunlight, soil, water. They strangle one another, poison one another, create seeds that poison animals, and on and on.
But its all consistent with vegetable blind optimization for their environment.
As for social organization, works, cooperation - the fact that they grow in a group and are impressively big says nothing about their sentience.
orthecreedence 1628 days ago [-]
You're using human metrics for accomplishments and applying them to a completely difference class of organism ("lol do trees even have a fiat currency banking system?!"). I'm not saying you're right or wrong, but I'm saying you have no idea whether trees are sentient, how they experience the world, or what kind of intelligence they posess, and you cannot determine any of these qualities by comparing them to humans.
tempguy9999 1628 days ago [-]
"Brainless fungi trade resources with plants like a stock market"
"In soils across the world, fungi trade resources with the plants they colonise in a mutually beneficial relationship. But it turns out the fungi are savvy traders, taking advantage of their partners by shuttling goods to nutrient-starved areas where plants are willing to pay more than usual"
No grifting, fraud, hoaxes, deceptions, violence, dishonesty -never even mention atom bombs, firethrowers, IEDs ... Clearly not sentient.
tempguy9999 1628 days ago [-]
In addition, not read this paper but it's high on my to-do list:
"Learning by Association in Plants"
extract of abstract: "the possibility that plants are also able to acquire learned associations to guide their foraging behaviour has never been demonstrated. Here we show that this type of learning occurs in the garden pea, Pisum sativum. By using a Y-maze task, we show that the position of a neutral cue, predicting the location of a light source, affected the direction of plant growth. This learned behaviour prevailed over innate phototropism"
Plants can be parasites, practice deceit, produce poisons to kill animals and other competing plants, kill other plants by strangultion as well (and likely other ways). Perhaps that was your point and I missed it.
8bitsrule 1628 days ago [-]
"Plants can ...practice deceit"
Sounds almost like intentionality (sentience) there.
Plants sure aren't all sweetness and light. I did suggest that, while sentience leads to inventions, it also leads to (non-feeding) murder, war (largely restricted to humans), and possibly extinction. If we 'have' any advantages on plants, sentience may not be it.
Plants can't move, and can't speak. That may explain why they've been around for oh, 50 times longer than us. And will almost certainly be around LONG after we're not. Smart?
tempguy9999 1627 days ago [-]
Not agreeing or disagreeing, just pinning stuff down here...
> Sounds almost like intentionality (sentience) there
Hmm. Clarification needed - does the concept of deceit mean the deceiver understands what it is doing ie. has theory of mind? If so, I'd guess plants do not deceive but do something similar driven by evolution[0] that we need a different word for as it's not sentience-driven.
I'm open to the idea of evolution itself has some sentience but I'd not waste time on it as I don't see it's a testable hypothesis.
> If we 'have' any advantages on plants, sentience may not be it.
Agreed, but sentience may actually be an advantage. After all it's not the sentience in mankind that genuinely makes me despair but other features such as greed and short-termism. Fix those and maybe our chances of racial survival would be hugely increased. IOW we have many mental aspects and sentience is only one of them.
> around for oh, 50 times longer than us
Plants separated from aninmls ~1.7 billion years ago (figure from memory), humans have been around a few hundred thousand years, by various definitions of 'human'. I guess you dropped a few zeros :)
It's not just any reaction. Your reaction to seeing a flower is not the same as your reaction to rocks falling on your head. To call this a "reaction" would be to pointedly understate what is occurring.
There are different words that could have been used, like "alarm" for instance. But to leave it at "reaction" would be leaving out important details of the story that could otherwise be conveyed in a single word better than just "to react".
Tempest1981 1628 days ago [-]
Agreed. But if the headline said "Plants react to water", would anyone read it? Or "Researchers water plants"?
The word "panic" is in quotes, as a simplification of "invoke a defensive and protective reaction", and to get non-scientists to read a science article... not a terrible thing.
Edit: the original article does not quote "panic", but Professor Harvey Millar uses the word, so not clickbait?
I have eaten fruits and nuts, and pissed and defecated in nature, so I have also communicated with plants both ways...
wcoenen 1628 days ago [-]
The article talks about signals and proteins that activate genes, but it doesn't say what actual response of the plant is being implemented by those genes. I thought maybe this was an omission, but the paper doesn't seem to talk about that either.
lawzup 1628 days ago [-]
So, what defenses are triggered? Seems like this article is half written. Where's the cause and effect? What are these protective effects you mention?
adfkbuvasdas 1628 days ago [-]
The instruction to pour water straight into the pot, and not onto the plant, always struck me as odd. Maybe it’s one of those small ancient nuggets of knowledge that we struggle to justify but just work. Might be a big leap still, but reactions like the one from this paper could justify not spraying water all over my house plants.
mytailorisrich 1628 days ago [-]
Tap water is often hard so pouring it on the plant leaves deposits behind.
Another justification is that when it's sunny water droplets on leaves act as lenses and might burn the leaves.
It is also known that wet leaves increase the chance of fungi, mildew, etc. taking hold on them. The article shows that plants are also well aware of that!
swiley 1628 days ago [-]
I was always told that the leaves just don’t need it and it gets in the way.
lawlessone 1628 days ago [-]
I wonder would pouring water onto the leaves of chilis plants encourage it to produce hotter peppers?
The substance that makes chilis spicy is a natural anti fungal.
saimiam 1628 days ago [-]
I have a chili plant at home with 4-5 baby chilies growing. Once those have ripened, I'm going to do this experiment.
kaikai 1628 days ago [-]
Plants do most of their water absorption through their roots, not their leaves. They're also prone to fungal problems when their leaves stay damp. There's no reason to water the leaves rather than the dirt around the roots, unless you're applying a foliar spray or watering something like a tillandsia that doesn't normally live on the ground.
The article says it's no surprise plants panic because water spreads disease, which is exactly what we're avoiding by not watering the leaves. It's not to save our plants' feelings, although the root cause of the feelings and the problem we're avoiding might be the same.
It would have been nice to see what particular plants were used in this study. I somehow doubt that all plants react this way. Considering some plants grow under water, others such as sequoias are dependent on fog for their irrigation. Interesting article none the less.
Thaliana 1628 days ago [-]
The plants used in this study are Arabidopsis thaliana, which is a very commonly used model organism in plant biology.
I think it's not a particularly wild assumption that a lot of plants will react in this way. The MYC2 protein and jasmonic acid are important regulators of plant defenses so priming of defenses when it rains makes sense. There are pathogens (such as Pseudomonas syringae) that can trick a plant into opening its stomate, which are airholes on the leaves, as a means of gaining access to the interior of the leaf.
As the paper describes how the mechanical action of rain can wash pathogens around the leaf or onto other plants I think it's reasonable to think other plants would react like this.
The interplay between the jasmonic acid pathway and other plant hormone pathways is super interesting as plants, in general, have two ways of defending themselves. For pathogens that feed on dead tissue the name of the game is to keep the cells alive (jasmonic acid can be thought of as generally responsible for this sort of response), whereas for pathogens that feed on live tissue then the plant will kill of cells local to the infection site in order to deny the pathogen food (salicylic acid is largely responsible here).
sigmaprimus 1628 days ago [-]
I still stand by my original comment, it would have been nice to have the type of plant studied included in the article and or in the synopsis of the paid article.
"The plants used in this study are Arabidopsis thaliana" was this information in the story and I just missed it? Or are you making that assumption due to that being a "very commonly used model organism in plant biology"?
The plant image used at the top of the article looks nothing like rock cres but instead more like some sort of hosta or lilly pad, I wonder if the image plant is shaped that way to catch and funnel water away from its roots? Just as a palm does the opposite?
Anyways I could go on, just wish they had included the species in the article.
Thaliana 1628 days ago [-]
Checking the article again I got it from the "More Information" box at the bottom of the article. The paper is titled "In vivo evidence for a regulatory role of phosphorylation of Arabidopsis Rubisco activase at the Thr78 site" so that means A. thaliana.
The picture is certainly misleading, I guess they just grabbed a generic "plants in a rainforest" picture for evocative reasons.
sigmaprimus 1628 days ago [-]
I understand the premise of the article and it makes sense, a very common example of this occuring in many gardens would be powdered mildew on squashes and the like. The leaves dont even have to be penetrated in order to damage the plant and rain definitely encourages the spreading from leaf to leaf.
quixoticelixer- 1628 days ago [-]
Sequoias still see a lot of rainfall where they live
We have plenty of redwoods growing in my country (NZ) that aren't watered by fogs but by just plain ol' rain.
While I'm sure that fogs are essential for redwoods in the California climate, it doesn't mean they are inherently coupled - they grow quite happily in the inland Canterbury Plains, bugger all fog, but enough rain to get them watered.
Fair enough, interesting fact just as all roosters are chickens but not all chickens are roosters, not all redwoods are sequoias. I actually mixed them up too.
https://www.pnas.org/content/early/2019/10/25/1911758116
>“As to why plants would need to panic when it rains, strange as it sounds, rain is actually the leading cause of disease spreading between plants,” said University of Western Australia’s Professor Harvey Millar, co-author of the study.
“When a raindrop splashes across a leaf, tiny droplets of water ricochet in all directions. These droplets can contain bacteria, viruses, or fungal spores.”
“The sick leaves can act as a catapult and in turn spread smaller droplets with pathogens to plants several feet away. It is possible that the healthy plants close by want to protect themselves,
I'm torn because maybe I wouldn't have read the article without the needless anthropomorphization. Plants are awesome and interesting to me because they're so planty and not animaly.
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/28256439-the-hidden-life...
It's different from a mere adrenal response that has short term gain at long term risk.
Adrenaline makes you jump higher. Panic makes you jump off a cliff.
At least in my personal dictionary.
Yes. When something is panic inducing.
Note that the bad connotations of panic are for not panic worthy situations (e.g. don't panic when you just lost your wallet, etc).
But when chased by a predator, a panic response is a good, and evolutionary created, way, to get from 0-60 mph adrenaline and speed wise...
A gazelle doesn't sit still and weigh the situation calmly. It panics and starts to run for its life...
Once you decide to move, run (if that wasn't an instinctive response), then panic is over and action has ensued.
It's the "beachball of doom" bit that happens when the you spot the lion. Do I fight, or hide, or run, ... {computing best response, please wait} ... it's the wait in that parenthetical bit where your supervisory control systems say "argh, this is taking too long, in going to get eaten".
Surely?
The dictionary.com definition has it as "overwhelming fear that causes a sudden hysterical or irrational behaviour". Running from a predator is rational, or instinctive.
Well, complains should be directed to evolution.
>Being chased by a predator and you run? Are humans likely the fastest animals?
Depends on the predator, for humans it will many times be other humans (or other homo species), and the extra boost panic mode gives you can very much help. Besides you don't have to merely run, you can run and hide, run and jump on some tree, etc.
>The only way out is to outsmart it and you can't do that if you're panicking.
You don't care much for outsmarting and subtle strategy when it's life or death either.
From Wikipedia:
"An evolutionary psychology explanation is that early animals had to react to threatening stimuli quickly and did not have time to psychologically and physically prepare themselves. The fight or flight response provided them with the mechanisms to rapidly respond to threats against survival."
If I come at you screaming with a knife would you sit and think how to outsmart me for a while, or start to panic / hide behind something / run trying to escape/avoid me? I'd like to see someone try the former...
>The word itself carries an undesirable connotation and is never - by definition - the best course of action
That's at the human cultural level, where it's 99.99% applied to non life-threatening situations, one should not worry as much about.
On the evolutionary/animal level, panic (aka fight or flight) is an excellent mechanism to stay alive...
Also, it would seem that the panic response is evolved for the benefit of the flock, not the individual, as it spreads rapidly; if one person panics, more will follow suit.
If it had "disappeared in humans a long time ago" then that still implies a time when it existed. And if it could have existed, it could exist now.
Fright: fear excited by sudden danger
...
Panic: a sudden overpowering fear excited by sudden danger
Well, that's unfortunate because his definition happens to be the right one.
Also keep in mind some believe that a lot of "animalyness" is also "plantyness".
http://www.bbc.com/earth/story/20170109-plants-can-see-hear-...
https://mospace.umsystem.edu/xmlui/handle/10355/6759
Plants and fungi have some very complex interactive networks capable of various forms of individual, inter-individual, and inter-species communication and intelligent decision making. From our perspective though, these interactions and decisions play out over some very different time scales from our own cognition. Suppose for a second that a tree was intelligent enough to be sentient, it would be VERY difficult for either the tree or us to recognize the intelligence and cognition in the other.
"Panic" responses, fear, and the whole manner of physiologic changes that happen in a human didn't spring up over-night. These pathways evolved a VERY long time ago. An insect has some obvious "panic" type of responses to predation attempts that are not so different from our own. As you climb up the ladder in intelligence to mammals, and then all the way to humans, there is absolutely no clear line where "panic" suddenly exists as I believe you would define it. It's a very smooth and gradual transition. Even in a human, if you've ever watched one come back to consciousness after a seizure or wake up from anesthesia, you'll see that it's also a very smooth and gradual transition to what we'd call consciousness and sentience. It's not at all an on/off switch.
I wouldn't be at all surprised if some of the same neurotransmitters and hormones fill the same role in a plant response to dangerous conditions as they would humans. I know many of the same signalling molecules are in use. Evolution doesn't like to fix what ain't broke.
Oh! They've done nothing! No tribes nor social exchanges - never even mention hospitals and lasers and money and law...
No, trees are not sentient, intelligent nor exhibiting cognition.
But its all consistent with vegetable blind optimization for their environment.
As for social organization, works, cooperation - the fact that they grow in a group and are impressively big says nothing about their sentience.
"In soils across the world, fungi trade resources with the plants they colonise in a mutually beneficial relationship. But it turns out the fungi are savvy traders, taking advantage of their partners by shuttling goods to nutrient-starved areas where plants are willing to pay more than usual"
(from https://www.newscientist.com/article/2205604-brainless-fungi...)
FYI. Sort of relevant.
"Learning by Association in Plants"
extract of abstract: "the possibility that plants are also able to acquire learned associations to guide their foraging behaviour has never been demonstrated. Here we show that this type of learning occurs in the garden pea, Pisum sativum. By using a Y-maze task, we show that the position of a neutral cue, predicting the location of a light source, affected the direction of plant growth. This learned behaviour prevailed over innate phototropism"
https://www.nature.com/articles/srep38427
Incredible, if validated.
Sounds almost like intentionality (sentience) there.
Plants sure aren't all sweetness and light. I did suggest that, while sentience leads to inventions, it also leads to (non-feeding) murder, war (largely restricted to humans), and possibly extinction. If we 'have' any advantages on plants, sentience may not be it.
Plants can't move, and can't speak. That may explain why they've been around for oh, 50 times longer than us. And will almost certainly be around LONG after we're not. Smart?
> Sounds almost like intentionality (sentience) there
Hmm. Clarification needed - does the concept of deceit mean the deceiver understands what it is doing ie. has theory of mind? If so, I'd guess plants do not deceive but do something similar driven by evolution[0] that we need a different word for as it's not sentience-driven.
I'm open to the idea of evolution itself has some sentience but I'd not waste time on it as I don't see it's a testable hypothesis.
> If we 'have' any advantages on plants, sentience may not be it.
Agreed, but sentience may actually be an advantage. After all it's not the sentience in mankind that genuinely makes me despair but other features such as greed and short-termism. Fix those and maybe our chances of racial survival would be hugely increased. IOW we have many mental aspects and sentience is only one of them.
> around for oh, 50 times longer than us
Plants separated from aninmls ~1.7 billion years ago (figure from memory), humans have been around a few hundred thousand years, by various definitions of 'human'. I guess you dropped a few zeros :)
[0] eg. natural variegation in plants (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Variegation) seems to make insects attack them less as discoloration makes the plants look to the insects less healthy (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Variegation#Defensive_masquera...).
There are different words that could have been used, like "alarm" for instance. But to leave it at "reaction" would be leaving out important details of the story that could otherwise be conveyed in a single word better than just "to react".
The word "panic" is in quotes, as a simplification of "invoke a defensive and protective reaction", and to get non-scientists to read a science article... not a terrible thing.
Edit: the original article does not quote "panic", but Professor Harvey Millar uses the word, so not clickbait?
Another justification is that when it's sunny water droplets on leaves act as lenses and might burn the leaves.
It is also known that wet leaves increase the chance of fungi, mildew, etc. taking hold on them. The article shows that plants are also well aware of that!
The substance that makes chilis spicy is a natural anti fungal.
The article says it's no surprise plants panic because water spreads disease, which is exactly what we're avoiding by not watering the leaves. It's not to save our plants' feelings, although the root cause of the feelings and the problem we're avoiding might be the same.
I think it's not a particularly wild assumption that a lot of plants will react in this way. The MYC2 protein and jasmonic acid are important regulators of plant defenses so priming of defenses when it rains makes sense. There are pathogens (such as Pseudomonas syringae) that can trick a plant into opening its stomate, which are airholes on the leaves, as a means of gaining access to the interior of the leaf.
As the paper describes how the mechanical action of rain can wash pathogens around the leaf or onto other plants I think it's reasonable to think other plants would react like this.
The interplay between the jasmonic acid pathway and other plant hormone pathways is super interesting as plants, in general, have two ways of defending themselves. For pathogens that feed on dead tissue the name of the game is to keep the cells alive (jasmonic acid can be thought of as generally responsible for this sort of response), whereas for pathogens that feed on live tissue then the plant will kill of cells local to the infection site in order to deny the pathogen food (salicylic acid is largely responsible here).
"The plants used in this study are Arabidopsis thaliana" was this information in the story and I just missed it? Or are you making that assumption due to that being a "very commonly used model organism in plant biology"? The plant image used at the top of the article looks nothing like rock cres but instead more like some sort of hosta or lilly pad, I wonder if the image plant is shaped that way to catch and funnel water away from its roots? Just as a palm does the opposite? Anyways I could go on, just wish they had included the species in the article.
The picture is certainly misleading, I guess they just grabbed a generic "plants in a rainforest" picture for evocative reasons.
https://baynature.org/article/fog-and-redwoods-demystifying-...
While I'm sure that fogs are essential for redwoods in the California climate, it doesn't mean they are inherently coupled - they grow quite happily in the inland Canterbury Plains, bugger all fog, but enough rain to get them watered.
Hell, we even named a suburb after one: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Redwood,_Christchurch
http://sequoia.visionbib.com/sequoia-redwood.html
dependent on fog in certain locales.
Would this be "that smell" that sometimes lingers after rain fall?