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Hidden under your feet is an information superhighway that allows plants to communicate and help each other out. It’s made of fungi
Scientists increasingly believe that trees and plants communicate with each other, various living things, and the environment. Now there’s additional evidence thanks to a new study on “natural language”. Researchers from three Tel-Aviv University schools—plant sciences and food security, zoology, and mechanical engineering—collaborated on a study that measures how evening primroses, or Oenothera drummondii, respond to sound.In this study, the scientists compared plants’ response to different sounds at various frequencies and used laser vibrometry to measure the vibration of the flowers’ petals. They also evaluated pollinators and flowers interacting in the field.The research team played sounds like that of bees’ wings beating to evening primroses. The flowers vibrated when they heard the sounds. It’s as if they were listening. But the flowers didn’t respond the same way to every sound, or to silence. When scientists played recordings of pollinators flying past, and other sounds at similar frequencies to those bees make, the flowers answered by quickly producing a sweeter nectar within three minutes.
Plants, according to Jack C Schultz, "are just very slow animals".This is not a misunderstanding of basic biology. Schultz is a professor in the Division of Plant Sciences at the University of Missouri in Columbia, and has spent four decades investigating the interactions between plants and insects. He knows his stuff.
Evolutionary ecologist Monica Gagliano insists that plants are intelligent, and she’s not speaking metaphorically. “My work is not about metaphors at all,” Gagliano tells Forbes. “When I talk about learning, I mean learning. When I talk about memory, I mean memory.”Gagliano’s behavioral experiments on plants suggest that—while plants don’t have a central nervous system or a brain—they behave like intelligent beings.Gagliano, who began her career as a marine scientist, says her work with plants triggered a profound epiphany. “The main realization for me wasn’t the fact that plants themselves must be something more than we give them credit for, but what if everything around us is much more than we give it credit for, whether it’s animal, plant, bacteria, whatever.”