Boquila trifoliolata mimics leaves of an artificial plastic host plant (2021)
tandfonline.com
tandfonline.com
“In a 2022 paper, it was suggested that the plant has some sort of vision using ocelli. This hypothesis was presented on the basis of experiments in which the vine appeared to mimic plastic vines and artificial plants. However, the only control used was the lower leaves on the same plants, with an opaque shelf over them which could have influenced light exposure. The lack of control plants climbing anything apart from the same model of artificial host plant makes it plausible that the observed differences were due to age and light exposure.”
The current process is wasting everyone's time.
I have no ability to vet the paper for science I'm afraid, but on an intuitive level, and especially given all the different biological sensing and animal-cleverness results that have been reported in recent years, I would not be at all surprised if the 'vision' hypothesis holds in the end.
Cuttlefish (maybe even perhaps their skin independently of the brain?) can do this type of pattern-sensing and response, so why not plants?
To be able to do this kind of thing only requires slightly a bigger (and perhaps differently-shaped) buffer for information ultimately, right?
They also can get by, for the same reason, with radically less of it, because the same machinery can worry at all stages of the problem, serially, one after another, not all at once as animals must.
Finally, because slow processing demands such a small fraction of their energy budget, they can afford to support a great deal more of it than animals can.
Plants can afford to be very, very intelligent. If we have not found examples of it, we might just not be looking correctly. What a plant could usefully do with intelligence might be decidedly non-obvious to such as ourselves, but it would be idiotic to conclude no such use is likely.
(Octopus, incidentally, are able to mimic colors their eyes are believed not equipped to perceive.)
But actually the hypotheses I've seen align more with the original poster's ideas. Plants don't want their leaves eaten. That's why they produce so many secondary chemicals to make leaves taste bitter or hard to digest. Most plants don't even want their fruit eaten actually. A plant has to spend a lot of "evolution points" (to borrow a phrase from TierZoo) to adapt to being able to survive the digestive process of whichever seed disperser it wants to attract.
Nobody expects it to survive and propagate outdoors.
Are you experienced with growing plants this difficult? I'm big into plants and spend a lot of time reading about plants like these and it always saddens me to read about cool plants and then see that they're endangered because of wild harvesting to sell on the market. I always wonder who the hell is buying this. B. trifoliolata has not yet been evaluated for whether or not its endangered and it's unlikely it will any time soon since parasitic plants are notoriously hard to diagnose. Please don't go out searching for this unless you're absolutely sure you have the equipment and knowledge necessary to actually propagate this plant. A quick search on the Tropical Fruit Forum[1] shows that no one else has really had much success in cultivating this
[0] https://www.gbif.org/species/7306115 [1] https://tropicalfruitforum.com/
I just want to study it more as it is a pretty fascinating plant.
For some reason that principled caution goes out the window once we start talking about plants.
Here on HN I've seen folks equate photoreceptivity to consciousness, chemical exchanges between roots to full fledged "communication", and indulge in open ended musing about the gaia hypothesis. Practically everything is game and there's no telling how seroius people are being or if they're just getting lost in their own metaphors.
Different people, different ideas.
See also: bacteria and fungi
"chemical exchanges between roots to full fledged "communication"" - without context it may have been a perfectly reasonable supposition.
"open ended musing about the gaia hypothesis" - hard to tell if it's a few or endemic without examples
But yes, I've seen people suggest that photo-receptivity amounts to consciousness, that amoeba can feel sensation, that the human genome is complex and can be reasonably assumed to host its own form of consciousness, and that chemical exchanges between plants amounts to full fledged communication, without any limiting qualifications.
>"chemical exchanges between roots to full fledged "communication"" - without context it may have been a perfectly reasonable supposition.
Perhaps I can add your endorsement of this view to the list, and we can later see if your view is brushed off belonging to a small minority of nutters.
As for "Perhaps I can add your endorsement of this view to the list..." please be careful. Communication requires an exchange of information. If the exchange is in the form of chemicals, that's fine as communication is happening via chemical exchange. But whether chemical exchange alone IS communication is a philosophical question[1]. All I'm saying is that you may be misrepresnting or misunderstanding other people's stated position. Again, without links to read I can't judge.
[1] I'd say yes it is but am open to being shown wrong. It probably depends on whether you believe conscious intent is required. I say no, others may say yes, it is needed.
Not long ago, it was believed that animals (and human babies) couldn't feel pain. Nowadays it's a ridiculous notion, but it was born of the idea that a certain animal was "exceptional" among all those others and has all these special properties, granted by God, that no other animals possess. That's not a belief that should be the "scientific" default anymore.
Depends on what you mean by language. If you mean "a structured system of communication", then it absolutely is. The only modern scientific rejection of birds songs as language is based around the definition of the word "language".
They're saying many different things such as "I'm ready to mate", "I'm hungry", "Stay away", "Come here", and "Predator nearby". Not only that, but birds are able to specify which kind of predator is nearby.
There's a resistance to these ideas that goes beyond objective science, and it's because we were previously basing our understandings on faulty assumptions. There's even a term for it, "human exceptionalism".
[0] https://aeon.co/essays/the-gaia-hypothesis-reimagined-by-one...