Startling! Israeli Scientists Discover Plants Scream When Cut
Plant illustration. (Photo: BRIN)
TEL AVIV, – The scientists captured the “screaming” sound of the plants when they were harvested. The sound is not the same as a human scream, but rather a popping or clicking sound at an ultrasonic frequency beyond the range of human hearing.
Even more interesting, the sound increases when the plant is stressed. The findings were revealed by researchers from Tel Aviv University in Israel, in research published in the journal Cell.
The study took place last year. It is said that the sound of screams can be one of the ways plants use to communicate their feelings of sadness or distress to the world around them.
“Even in a quiet field, there are actually sounds that we don't hear, and these sounds carry information. "There are animals that can hear these sounds, so there is a possibility that there are a lot of acoustic interactions (between living creatures other than humans)," said evolutionary biologist at Tel Aviv University, Lilach Hadany, to Science Direct, recently.
"Plants interact with insects and other animals all the time, and many of these organisms use sound to communicate, so it would be very suboptimal if plants did not use sound at all," he said further.
When stressed, plants undergo some dramatic changes. One of them is shown through a strong aroma. They can also change their color and shape.
However, Hadany and his team wanted to know more than just these common signs. They were curious, do plants also produce sound when under pressure?
To find out, they recorded the results of observations of tomato and tobacco plants, both under stressed conditions and not. They concluded that plants experience “distress” when their stems are cut or become dehydrated.
The scientists then trained a machine learning algorithm to differentiate between the sounds produced by unstressed plants, cut plants, and dehydrated plants.
The team found that the sound of the disturbed plants was too high to be heard by humans, and could be detected within a radius of more than one meter, according to the Science Alert report.
However, it is still unclear how plants produce these sounds.
Meanwhile, researchers also found that plants that weren't under stress didn't make much sound at all. They just “relax” and do their business as plants in silence.