Tomato fruits send electrical warnings to the rest of the plant when attacked
blog.frontiersin.org
blog.frontiersin.org
I am really interested in building custom systems to experiment with plants. My problem is that I don't know what to test.
Presumably hydrogen peroxide does not taste good to caterpillars.
Some do experiment with that today, like this
[1] https://alainsprojects.com/the-primeval-code-der-urzeit-code...
I also remember news about chinese greenhouses experimenting with similar stuff, reporting good growth and much reduced need for pesti-/fungi-/whatever -zides, or none at all in the timeframe of the last 2 to 3 years.
It all resulted from research at Ciba-Geigy AG, Basel, Swiss now Novartis by Guido Ebner, thus also called "Ebner Effect".
Classic conspiracy material, because not usable for a company like that, so they stopped the research, and locked it away. (allegedly)
The researcher died meanwhile, but his sons have some patents, also selling this [2] https://fios-greenbox.net/
Some more lazy links...
[3] https://www.elstel.org/primeval-times-code.html
[4] https://vimeo.com/14844889
[5] https://www.scmp.com/news/china/science/article/2164365/elec...
Now, it is possible that certain other types of meows are only used to elicit human behavior.
The supporting evidence for this hypothesis, I believe, is that meowing has been observed to be a learned communication technique gained only if a cat interacts with humans during development; adult feral cats, living only around other cats during their development, never learn this technique or its social meaning, and so don't understand the social signal being communicated by domestic cats when the domestic cat meows at them, nor do they try to use it in response.
(Same goes with the domestic cat's social signal of keeping their tail raised when standing to express trust. Feral cats don't develop that habit, either.)
Remain perfectly still like Drax so it doesn't see us?
Try to taste bad?
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/the-whispering...
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/28256439-the-hidden-life...
(I can recommend the Audible version.)
https://www.wnycstudios.org/podcasts/radiolab/articles/from-...
I honestly have no idea and I'd love to know more
The research paper's abstract says this:
>The results show with 90% of accuracy that the electrome registered in the fruit's peduncle before herbivory is different from the electrome during predation on the fruits. Interestingly, there was also a sharp difference in the electrome of the green and ripe fruits' peduncles before, but not during, the herbivory, which demonstrates that the signals generated by the herbivory stand over the others. Biochemical analysis showed that herbivory in the fruit triggered an oxidative response in other parts of the plant.
https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fsufs.2021.6574...
e: side note, this is the software they used for the computation, including Machine Learning.
>The code libraries used were: Numpy and Pandas for data manipulation; Scipy, Obspy and Math for mathematical calculations; Matplotlib for creating graphics; Sklearn and Statsmodels for machine learning.
does that mean it makes itself more cancerous?
[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attack_of_the_Killer_Tomatoe...
Electrical signals in response to an attack that trigger a defensive response look a lot like pain.
IMO, what we're seeing here could absolutely be considered "pain" in the plant kingdom, without altering or stretching the definition of the word even in the slightest.
Here's a biologist saying not all humans experience pain, if it's not even a universal human experience I don't know why you'd apply it to plants instead of a more technical term:
"Interviewer: Right, and isn't sensing damage, even without a neural system, essentially pain?
Daniel Chamovitz: The idea that damage has to be pain is mistaken. We feel pain because we have specific types of receptors called nociceptors which are programmed to respond to pain, not to touch. People can have genetic malfunctions where they feel pressure but never feel pain because they don't have pain receptors."
https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.vice.com/amp/en/article/xd7..."
A different article on the subject on plant pain has a biologist suggesting not to use human terms or animal terms:
""Plants can detect light, but I don’t think you can say plants can ‘see.’” The same goes for hearing, tasting, feeling, smelling. The terms we use to describe our own interface with the world don’t seem transferable to plants. They describe the contours of a human-centric reality, made possible by our animal anatomy.""
https://www.discovermagazine.com/planet-earth/can-plants-fee...
I assume he meant we feel pain as a response to damage. Saying we feel pain because of a response to pain makes no sense.
The word "pain" has the concept of the mental experience of suffering pretty much baked in to it. Applying it to plants seems to very much stretch the definition when there is literally no biological structure in plants that corresponds to the neural activity organisms with a CNS when experiencing pain. An electrical pulse isn't really sufficient: plants send electric signals under a variety of circumstances.
Pain isn't merely a response to negative stimuli. That does stretch the definition.
(Would still need to be shown, but is conceivable)
I'm not sure where this would leave vegans.
All the neurotransmitters that are used for our CNS were originally evolved from plants.
some plants scream when cut https://www.sciencetimes.com/articles/24473/20191218/a-group...
This research doesn’t suggest that plants suffer or are somehow sentient, just that they react to stimuli in a way that’s advantageous to survival.
If you try to cut an animal, it runs away or fights back. If you try to cut a plant, it sits there are lets you cut it. A plant may have some electrochemical response to ensure that a predator doesn’t kill it (which could simply be the result of natural selection), but that isn’t good evidence for us to even begin to entertain the idea that a plant feels pain.
In the absence of evidence, we shouldn’t make up wild ideas that don’t fit our best current understanding.
Some species have been shown to communicate using pheromones to increase tannins in the leaves of their neighbours.
Agreed about in the absence of evidence, but in the absence of much study being done we could maybe have a closer look?
In my experience that tends to encourage more, smaller fruit; which is good cuz it reduces loss to insects etc (they ruin a whole fruit at a time). If you want a single tomato the size of a child's head, tho; let it keep the first few it sets and then pinch flowers before they open after that.
Maybe because of all the slicing and chopping we often do to tomatoes before we eat them.
I don't think we can declare that plants think or even have communication among their parts based on this small amount of data. Too many other possibilities.
That's why I find popular claims of the form "plants can't do X because they have no nervous system" somewhat misleading. Plant cells still have all the other means of inter-cell signalling available - so communication and information processing is happening a lot slower in plants than in animals, but it absolutely does take place.
> he results showed a clear difference between the signals before and after attack.
If they didn't use a rigorous separation of train, test and validation sets, I'm skeptical that this might have been overtraining.
I do a veg garden, with tomatoes of course. When I water them at the end of the day I also spray the tops because I want the leaves to tell the roots...get ready, rain is coming.
I have no idea if this happens or not. But from a survival perspective it makes sense that it would.
So? does that automatically imply that it does not feel pain?
>What science generally understands under pain and suffering plants simply don't have.
Listen, I don't buy the science say this and science say that kind of arguments. ANY living being ( assuming we can settle for what can be called 'alive') will have a mechanism for self preservation, pain is one of them. The onus is on 'science' or people to prove otherwise.
Neither of these are applicable to plants, so there doesn't seem to be any evolutionary reason to evolve pain receptors.
(Maybe not by insects though.)
The fact that fruits need to be eaten to perpetuate the species is not linked to the existence of humans.
Birds, mammals, many species disseminate seeds.
No central nervous system does imply no mind to feel pain.
If you were to scoop my brain out of my body and keep my lower body alive below the neck the nervous system would not feel pain as there is no mind to feel it.
Science can't prove the world is not the dream of a giant turtle- so technically I can't "know" anything- so asking "how can you know that?" Is kind of a boring line of questioning. It has no answer other than "Well I guess technically I can't know that, or anything," But that doesn't mean turtle dreams are going to get equal weight with our empirical models of the world.
Or there could be none besides those with a CNS. Science may have a long way to go on understanding minds, but speculation on other sorts of minds entirely is still within the realm of science fiction. So, if you're going to assert something like a conscious experience by plants then you should understand that you are taking it as an article of faith.
A cornerstone of science is empirical observation, and we can all observe our own consciousness to some degree. It's hardly perfect or even nearly complete, but it's something.
You can play semantics with the word "pain" all you want, but the biological differences between what we call pain as experienced by humans and the stimuli response from plants are sufficiently different to surpass a difference of degree and make it a difference of kind. You need a word besides "pain", or the onus is on you to demonstrate the appropriateness of that term when you are using it so far outside its normal context.
Quite a number actually do have nervous systems [0], using neurotransmitters that have actually been found in mammals. They respond to wounding, both with efforts to repair it, and with chemical deterrents to the cause.
Now, that isn't to say that they necessarily have pain and suffering, but it wouldn't be surprising to learn that some plants possess that capability.
Jellyfish have a nervous system but not a CNS.
I have no idea where the ethical line ought to be here, but if plants have meaningful capacity to suffer then it’s also likely that PETA should be campaigning to limit the mistreatment of even the tiny AI we make while doing MOOCs on the basics of machine learning.
It went on to argue with me about data points it thought were outliers that should be removed.
Is that another word for plants?
1) Eat anything your body can consume safely
2) Only eat things without brains
3) Only eat things you hunt/harvest/prepare yourself
4) Only eat animals that are already dead
5) Only eat plants and animals that are invasive or over populated
And the list goes on. Some are easier than others, but I don’t see the moral dilemma in maintaining a certain diet outside of “anything or nothing”.
I hope my dinner knows how delicious it is before I eat it. I would tell it if I could. Although that could get pretty awkward if it's something I don't like much:
"Listen, can we just agree that neither of us is really going to like what is about to happen?"
That's pretty much the only way I eat animals. It may be anecdotal, but supermarkets near me sell all of their meat pre-killed in neat little packages. I've never had to grind the beef off of a live cow to get my burger meat. Lobsters are an exception to that rule, but still generally seem dead by the time people eat them.
“Are you going to tell me,” said Arthur, “that I shouldn’t have green salad?”
“Well,” said the animal, “I know many vegetables that are very clear on that point. Which is why it was eventually decided to cut through the whole tangled problem and breed an animal that actually wanted to be eaten and was capable of saying so clearly and distinctly. And here I am.”
- Douglas Adams, The Restaurant at the End of the Universe