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Once Considered Outlandish, the Idea That Plants Help Their Relatives is Taking Root (sciencemag.org)
An anonymous reader shares a report: A Canadian biologist planted the seed of the idea more than a decade ago, but many plant biologists regarded it as heretical -- plants lack the nervous systems that enable animals to recognize kin, so how can they know their relatives? But with a series of recent findings, the notion that plants really do care for their most genetically close peers -- in a quiet, plant-y way -- is taking root.
. Some species constrain how far their roots spread, others change how many flowers they produce, and a few tilt or shift their leaves to minimize shading of neighboring plants, favoring related individuals.
"We need to recognize that plants not only sense whether it's light or dark or if they've been touched, but also whom they are interacting with," says Susan Dudley, a plant evolutionary ecologist at McMaster University in Hamilton, Canada, whose early plant kin recognition studies sparked the interest of many scientists. Beyond broadening views of plant behavior, the new work may have a practical side. In September 2018, a team in China reported that rice planted with kin grows better, a finding that suggested family ties can be exploited to improve crop yields. "It seems anytime anyone looks for it, they find a kin effect," says Andre Kessler, a chemical ecologist at Cornell University.
"We need to recognize that plants not only sense whether it's light or dark or if they've been touched, but also whom they are interacting with," says Susan Dudley, a plant evolutionary ecologist at McMaster University in Hamilton, Canada, whose early plant kin recognition studies sparked the interest of many scientists. Beyond broadening views of plant behavior, the new work may have a practical side. In September 2018, a team in China reported that rice planted with kin grows better, a finding that suggested family ties can be exploited to improve crop yields. "It seems anytime anyone looks for it, they find a kin effect," says Andre Kessler, a chemical ecologist at Cornell University.
I've heard something eerie similar on TED quite a lot time ago: Suzanne Simard: How trees talk to each other | TED Talk, and Greg Gage: Electrical experiments with plants that count and communicate | TED Talk. There are many other TED talks about the topic of plants' nervous system, intelligence and communication. This kinda invalidates the whole premise of vegetarianism but I don't want to argue about that now.
Would that leave scavenging are the only humane method for the acquisition of nutrients?
Good people do not need laws to tell them to act responsibly, while bad people will find a way around the laws-Plato
Reported science (popular science) is often about single, small group trials. Basically, if you see a science article in mainstream media that seems too good to be true, or highly unusual, check into the background of it before investing in it.
How and why do you think grasses evolved?
Yeah but good luck convincing the dumbshits.
Not science as a whole, but parts of it, yes. Take for example stomach ulcers. In the 1980s of course ulcers were caused by stress (how?) and spicy food (even though billions of people eat spicy every day and they don't get stomach ulcers.)
And this "science" was so thoroughly accepted that no questions were asked when pills were prescribed by the barrel to control stomach acid. Congratulations, you have tools that can modify the inner workings of the human body that so far was able to digest food on its own nicely without pills.
They even went so far as to sever the vagus nerve that controls acid production, with the end result that the ulcers are gone but now you have many, many life-long complications.
https://www.healthline.com/health/vagotomy
Comes along a doctor who thinks that a bacteria is living in the stomach lining and is causing the tissue erosion. Of course, doctors being the arrogant narrow-minded petty narcissists that they are, quickly mocked him. Because how can a bacteria live in stomach acid? (This was around the same time we were discovering about tube worms and extremophiles living near volcanic vents on the sea floor).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barry_Marshall
He had to swallow the bacteria himself to cause ulcers before the stubborn medical community would listen.
Eventually he got there, but doctors and scientists are just people ....
Can recognize each other, why not vegetables? After all they are more intelligent.
And besides that Mr. tree 'wants' you to eat that apple and deposit the seeds somewhere else in your manure. I personally eat meat because in my view everything eats every other damned thing in this cruel old world. But I think vegans remain morally safe eating plants. Janes, an Indian sect, are known to wait under trees until fruit falls. You are welcome.
"No fear. No envy. No meanness." Liam Clancy
It's also fascinating* to note that certain gut bacteria can influence the mood of the host and that there are taste buds buried deep in the digestive system, although my favourite is toxoplasmosis, which will literally lead mice to their doom in order to reproduce. *YMMV!
Do they *only* reach out in that direction? Or is it only the vines that manage to find something to grab on to that thrive?
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
A fruit is basically just a green or red/orange/yellow fetus that you can pluck and peel with a pairing knife.
You think the plants don't care because they don't reflexively cover their nads whenever anyone shows up with a baseball and a baseball bat? That they exist in pure vegetative bliss, like a steer happily chewing his cud, wondering what all the fuss is about?
You need to think a little bit harder about vegetative value systems. Try to work your way past the death fixation of Judeo-Christian ethics. Mostly we didn't kill slaves, either. And if they're happily alive, what's the problem?
Also, prairie agriculture makes extensive use of power equipment, and has for some time now (it's on the internet, you can look it up).
That's the daily breakfast prayer of the little-known prairie Ent, Skullgluten.
It probably isn't necessary to know exactly what people should be eating to maximize their health. It's far more important to know what kind of things to stay away from to avoid the worst negative health consequences, and we've got a good enough idea there. No one is telling the general population to eat more sugar.
... that at the very least, many plants attack their foes. Many plants produce chemicals in their roots or leaf litter that hinder plant growth or seed germination but which they themselves are immune to. And when I say "long known", observations of such allelopathathic effects date back to at least Theophrastus in 300 BC, and most agricultural societies have long had rules about how "Plant A will grow well with B but poorly with C", which can generally be seen as allelopathy. In research, most cases of concern are where weeds produce chemicals that hinder commercial crops, but it also works the other way around - for example, rice (which they mention above) creates root exudates hinder the germination of competing seedlings.
Of course, there are non-chemical ways (such as shade, root growth, etc) to hinder foes without hurting yourself or your brethren, but the chemical ways are usually the most striking, as their purposes are so unambiguous. While shade, root growth, etc can be natural consequences of your own development, you don't invest energy in producing secondary metabolites unless you want them to accomplish something with them.
Musk needs a safer hobby than Twitter. Fire juggling? Cage fighting? Solo hot air balloon trips?
Animal parks have long known that trees who get nibbled at by giraffes and other wild animals go hungry, because the trees alarm their relatives and all of them begin to send bitter poisons into their leaves, making them inedible. If they can't leave the park they die.
Imagine what all those cloned Cannabis plants are saying to each other? Probably something about where the hell are all the men?
These aren't conscious efforts. Sentience is a form of specialized nerve awareness
Neither consciousness nor sentience have objective definitions. Neither phenomena has an actual physical explanation.
Thus, you cannot determine what is or is not conscious, sentient, etc.
If this research means that plants have a degree of sentience, will killing plants be seen as exploitive?
There is commentary elsewhere in this thread that vegans could still eat fruit and nuts, because these are 'given' by plants as a reproductive attractant, not requiring death of the plant.
However, I see a big BUT coming. The difference between vegans and vegetarians is that vegetarians eat products nonlethally derived from animals, such as honey and dairy. Vegans consider these products to be 'exploiting' animals, so they are off the plate. The most advanced and morally pure vegan logicians are going to argue, how is an apple different from the milk of a cow? Because Nature intends that apples be eaten by animals that will derive nutrition from the apple while spreading its seeds, humans would be depriving the apple tree's ally species of this natural nutrient. Furthermore, very few apples consumed by humans result in natural apple propagation.
Most plants also (quite literally) feed the soil microbiome by producing sugars and other nutrients that bacteria and fungi absorb. The microorganisms return the favor by fixing nitrogen, for plants that don't do that themselves, as well as defending the roots from non-friendly microorganisms, and probably a whole host of other things that we don't even know about yet: perhaps even participating in the communication network that plants use to help identify clones vs. same-species neighbors vs. other plants.
If interested, check out Symphony of the Soil: https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
Whatever behavior, with forethought or not, with nervous system or not, with mobility and motor functions or not, that helped one set of alleles to survive better than others out competed the others.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
I wonder if we did similar studies with human ethnic populations what we might find.
Quite possibly something rather different to what we might find if we did similar studies with fairly small human families.
The brain doesn't need much glucose to function, medicinal science isn't about nutrition and nutritional pathways in the human mechanism, unsupported crap from ACs (whose brains need very little glucose) belong in Trump speeches not in slashdot posts.
No, one can't have chemical dependence on sugars. You are simply crazy.
Yet more proof that plants, are living, breathing, thinking, feeling creatures!
And yet we devour billions of them every day. Worse yet, they are often still alive when they are eaten!
Unconscionable!
At least meat-eaters kill their food first.
Stop the madness! Join PETP (pet-pee) today!
Oooh is that true? Please email me!