Dudley chalks up this discovery to her choice to temporarily set aside the usual question of how something benefited the plant. Instead, she simply observed what they actually did. “My innovation is that I was asking how plants behave,” she said. Looking at behavior is a different thing from looking at benefits to the plant. Sometimes it can be hard to know what a benefit would look like to a plant, anyhow. Humans don’t always know enough to infer these things. But they can watch and take notes about what’s actually happening in front of them.
