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A Plant That Can Smell
BlueCup writes "The question of how a dodder finds a host plant has puzzled researchers. Many thought it simply grew in a random direction, with discovery of a plant to attack being a chance encounter. But the researchers led by Consuelo M. De Moraes found that if they placed tomato plants near a germinating dodder, the parasite headed for the tomato 80 percent of the time. And when they put scent chemicals from a tomato on rubber, 73 percent of the dodder seedlings headed that way. Turns out, it sniffs out it's prey."
I can't find anything on google about it, but there was a tale of an experiment where a man went into a greenhouse and hacked up all the plants.
A bunch of scientific equipment was setup to measure plants behaviour/electrical impulses.
They then had 10 people walk through the room and when the man who hacked the plants entered the room the plants sent off strong/furious signals.
I always wondered if this was a true experiment or urban legend...but with this species of plants sensing different kinds of chemicals, it just might have been real.
Yo Grark
Canadian Bred with American Buttering
Nothing new here, as apparently, this one smells quite a lot.
I was hiking with my parents in the Shining Rock Wildnerness, an area in western North Carolina. Part of the wilderness was burned out sometime in the 1920's and the burn formed a long lasting grassland along several peaks. We hiked it sometime in the early 90's and it was the first time I saw dodder. It was this strange mat of oranged colored leafless vines, much like this growing on a particularly plant (very similar to what is in the photograph, I believe). The strange thing is that we had hiked this trail over many years and had never seen this before. So we wondered at first if it were some new invasive species from elsewhere. Turns out that this was native to the area, but for whatever reason it never had grown this prolifically before. Definitely one of the strangest plants I've ever run across.
The Acacia tree is sensitive to chemicals given off by other Acacia trees when they are damaged. It responds by increasing it's Tannin production in order to help ward off possible predators. I'm not sure of what the scientific definition of smell is, but I'd probably define it as "the ability to sense the existance of airborne chemicals".
God was my co-pilot, but then we crashed and I was forced to eat him.
Even *single-cell* flagellates have what can be considered a rusimentary sense of smell, and the capability of changing their locomotion in order to lead them to food. That sort of ability is present all the way up through the multicellular ladder, and "smell" (or response to airborne chemical signals) have been well-known for quite some time in plants.
Frankly, I'm susprised that they didn't start out with an assumption that smell was involved.
steve
Oh, you're not stuck, you're just unable to let go of the onion rings.
They don't mention what their sample size is, i.e., is it 100 plants?
I can toss a coin 4 times, and let's say I get tails 3 times. Simultaneously, if I was tossing another coin nearby, and happen to get 3 tails out of 4 again on it too, can I conclude that the second coin supernaturally knew what the result on the other one was? BTW, the probability that the above happens is 1/16. Also, I can repeat this experiment many times to get this case.
Obviously, those researchers are smart enough. My question is: how can they write such a big article without mentioning about the sample size?