To the researchers’ surprise, the dodder’s assessment of red light ratios appeared to be exquisitely fine-grain. In the lab, they used a combination of far-red LED arrays and real plants to set up tests; when given the option of LEDs arranged to resemble light passing through a grass-shaped plant and another resembling the body of a branched plant, the seedlings chose the direction of the “branched” one (dodders can’t grow on grasses). They also chose to grow toward the nearer of any two same-sized plants, even if the difference in distance was only four centimeters. It’s not a stretch to say
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