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March 18 - June 2, 2025
the trees were communicating with each other. Trees the caterpillars hadn’t yet reached were ready; they’d turned their leaves into weapons. The caterpillars that ate them got sick and died.
trees were too far apart to be passing information through their roots.
Rhoades could not help but let the true nut of the paper out as a chirp, using that most exposing punctuation: “This suggests that the results may be due to airborne pheromonal substances!”
a complicated form of intentionality, forethought, and an awareness of cause and effect.
genes could shift their positions in corn, called this cellular awareness the “knowledge the cell has of itself.”
there is no agreed-upon definition for what counts as communication, not even in animals. Does the signal need to be sent purposefully? Does it need to provoke a response in the receiver?
As every ecologist knows, nothing changes in an ecosystem without a reason.
after leaves had been enduring a swarm of munching caterpillars for a while, their chemistry changed; the plant would alter the contents of its leaves to be less nutritious.
Nature, never a flat plane, has always more folds and faces still hidden from human view. The world is a prism, not a window. Wherever we look, we find new refractions.
It was a coordinated poisoning.
If a sagebrush receives a chemical signal through the air, perhaps one that indicates dangerous predators are nearby, it’ll be more likely to heed the warning if it’s from a close family member.
using backchannels—the chemical compounds they use are complex and specific to them and their closest allies. But when the whole community is being heavily attacked, sagebrush will switch to “public” channels, emitting more universally understandable alarm calls.
In peaceful places, where relatively few dangerous predators lurk, birds use extremely specific song phrases to warn only their family group that something is wrong. But when the birds are facing widespread danger, they switch calls, making alarm sounds that everyone in the area can understand, even members of other bird species.
plants could be said to have dialects, and are alert to their contexts enough to know when to deploy them. More than that, they have a clear sense of who is who; who is family, and who is not. They are in touch with their surroundings, and with the fluctuating status of their enemies.
existential questions about what we think of as a healthy plant community, and what it means to actually protect them.
if communication is a vital function of plants, then our care for them must also extend to protecting their ability to “talk” to one another.
what is “too far” when the topic at hand is the agency of living creatures?
relentless use of synthetic fertilizers can in fact do indelible harm to ecosystems and soil fertility in the long run. New layers of soil complexity have more recently come into focus, involving interspecies relationships between untold numbers of microbes and fungi.
crops tend to be bred for productivity above anything else, often at the cost of other traits, like the ability to defend themselves. As such, huge quantities of pesticides and fertilizer are often needed to sustain them. Are monocultures like these fields also a monoculture of a single type of personality, I wonder?
For him, the difference between life forms is not about consciousness versus nonconsciousness, then, but about degrees and intensities of consciousness.
touching a plant could make it shorter, squatter, and more flexible—all
These are the action potentials—little bursts of electricity—produced, in your case, by the neurons in your heart that are firing at regular intervals to make it pump blood, and in the plant’s case—well, no one yet quite knows why they’re there, or what for.
the Great Oxygenation Event—the long period in which the earth’s atmosphere transitioned away from being a suffocating cage of carbon dioxide to an oxygen-dominated haven—he
plants did that. They made the terrestrial world a habitable place for other forms of life to arise, and eventually to be able to breathe. Without them, animal life as we know it would not even have had the faintest shot at clambering onto the evolutionary treadmill. Our cells would never have formed.
plants have designed the world around them to suit their needs. Why don’t we get that? We wouldn’t be here were it not for them. The idea that they lack agency is absurd, once you have that awareness.
the essence of the entire question of plant intelligence: How does something without a brain coordinate a response to any stimuli at all? How does information about the world get integrated, triaged by importance, and translated into action that benefits the plant? How can the plant sense its world at all, without a centralized place to parse all that information?
“The genetic code in the jellyfish is universal,” explained Gilroy. “You can take the code and put it into any other organism you want, and it will work the same.”
the whole plant was being notified of the wound.
“Could the whole plant be something like a brain?” I asked.
vine found to be acoustically tailored to correspond with bats;
the plant was responding specifically and exclusively to
If something is happening outside an organism that could be useful for its survival, that organism may have developed a way to sense it. Evolution, ever scanning for a benefit, will give the organism ways to use its awareness to further its project of survival.
it could be wildly useful to agriculture, if scientists can find the right application. After all, in Appel’s work, a sound cue caused the plant to make its own pesticide.
a future where farmers set up boom boxes instead of crop dusters.
“ecological relevance.”
Some flowers are buzz-pollinated, for example; they can be induced to release their pollen when played a recording of bees buzzing.
Could plants also listen for the sound of their fruit eaters, which are often noisy—think parrots—to time their ripening? Or the sound of thunder to prepare to receive the rain?
This is yet another reminder that when evolution has a good idea, we’ll likely see it across the spectrum of life.
The flower, in this case, was definitely the part of the plant responsible for “hearing”—and it suggests that it had taken on the bowl shape for exactly the same reason satellite dishes are concave.
nearly every pea plant grew its roots toward the sound of the running water.
plants emit very quiet clicking noises when air bubbles in their stems pop as water travels up them. This process is called cavitation, and these “cavitation clicks” seem to increase when plants are dealing with drought stress.
the cavitation click theory could be true.
possibility that farmers, equipped with ultrasonic sensors, would one day be able to listen for the water needs of their plants.
Could animals—or enticingly, other plants—detect and interpret those sounds? In other words, could the plants be communicating with sound? “If we can tell, then other organisms can tell,” she says.
once another organism starts using information provided by another living being, evolution often steps in to fine-tune the organism doing the providing.
is anything a coincidence in a living body?
prairie dogs appear to use adjectives, specific repeated sounds they use to describe the size, shape, color, and speed of predators.
Japanese great tits have syntax; they use distinct strings of chirps to instruct their comrades to scan for danger, or tell them to move closer.
associative learning is a crucial measure of intelligence in animals.
The ability for multiple independent people to repeat a study and get the same result is absolutely crucial for confirming new scientific conclusions, but its impossibility doesn’t always mean the original outcome is incorrect. It does, however, mean the study design isn’t sturdy enough to hang one’s hat on.
