The mystery of the mimic plant (2022) | Hacker News Reader

The mystery of the mimic plant (2022)

vox.com

96 pointsipsum238 comments

If it can mimic plastic plants placed next to it, and do that repeatedly under more rigorous experimental conditions, then it would seem to suggest the conclusion, that this vine can somehow visually 'see'.

The phenomena is very interesting, but the article is useless. This is a very simple and telling experiment - if the plant can mimic a plastic plant then it rules out all sort of potential explanations, and would have to be based on light (but let's not go overboard and say it'd require "vision" or a brain).

So, why haven't hundreds of university labs, or amateur plant lovers attempted to replicate or improve the experiment, and if they have why doesn't the article present the results?

Put plants made from Lego next to it and see if it’s mimicking the physical surrounding as it senses the environment from the way the photons are hitting it.

If the photons also carry the color of and it can sense the color of the photons, I wonder how similar this is to camelions and actopi and cuttle fish…

What's most interesting to me isn't just how this plant does it, but how such a capability evolved ...

There has to have been other more primitive sensing/copying capabilities that evolved into this, but what are/were they, and what were the evolutionary benefits of those more primitive capabilities ?

Are there any other plants still existing today that react to light in more than just a present/not-present or directional way ?

I have thought and talked about this so often with people. It is fascinating, such as the plants that mimic the shape of the birds that feed upon them - such as hummingbirds.

But the genes are not spread leaf-to-leaf - its through the roots, and may even be communicated through mycelium highways in the root systems where the same mycelium org is symbiotic with both plants.

I wonder what cultivating and formative impact "farming mycelium" might cause in an eco system.

I wonder if the plant in question is able to decode genes that it receives via the Hyphae fungal network, and knows the genes for "aesthetic and functional appearance for survival here, based on the active genes from the successful plants around me>" and can just sideload those genes into its makeup.

Does its offspring, or even clones - removed from that mimic'd env also continue to look like the mimic'd plant?

I am pretty sure that the transfer of genes is from the horizontal gene transfer among "neighboring leaves" as it were - but perhaps among the root, as shared by mycelium (fungi) rhizal -- mycorrhizal root structure which shares nutrients between a plant and the fungus.

>mycorrhizae, known as root fungi, form symbiotic associations with plant roots. In these associations, the fungi are actually integrated into the physical structure of the root. The fungi colonize the living root tissue during active plant growth. Through mycorrhization, the plant obtains phosphate and other minerals, such as zinc and copper, from the soil. The fungus obtains nutrients, such as sugars, from the plant root. Mycorrhizae help increase the surface area of the plant root system because hyphae, which are narrow, can spread beyond the nutrient depletion zone. <-- may lead to why the plants may seem far enough apart.

https://i.imgur.com/s3Xv6TF.png

https://i.imgur.com/PVn6grj.png

https://apsjournals.apsnet.org/doi/pdf/10.1094/MPMI-05-14-01...

https://bio.libretexts.org/Bookshelves/Introductory_and_Gene...

Here is another video on these plants though:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5UWWsYw9fH0

(this guy is talking about bacteria, but its fungi)

If a single plant can simultaneously mimic two different type of neighboring plant, then it seems unlikely that any potential horizontal gene transfer is happening through the roots, where it might be expected to affect the entire plant, not just one localized side.

I guess one would need to get the genomes(?) for all the plants involved in this Menage A Tree, and see if shared sequences exits? If not, it would indicate "vision"

But what we dont know is if plants have an EMF 'voice' that they may use to communicate?

EMF seems highly unlikely, but easy to disprove experimentally, as are pretty much any of these proposed mechanisms, which is why it seems surprising that such an interesting phenomena exist without yet (apparently) having been subject to more serious study!

Plants can obviously react to light. Photosynthesis, that's how they get their energy. Most plants seek light one way or the other.

Assuming the plastic plant really turn out to have an effect, It would be possible, I think, for a plant to somehow sense shade patterns using photosensitive chemicals diffusing through the plant at specific speeds.

its cells could detect discrete levels of light to detect a shape

Wouldn't need to be visual. Just requires some way of determining the placement of specific compounds. In most organisms this is by generic coding; your cells don't see a human standing next to your embryo and then decide to make you look like a human. If the plants aren't connected it could be inferred through other means, electromagnetic, auditory, maybe some plant cells move through the air.

Those non-visual mechanisms do not apply to a plastic plant.

Actually they do, electromagnetism does in fact interact with non organic materials

You're suggesting an electromagnetic phenomenon other than visible light? I suppose that would be comparably interesting.

last time I checked evidence for that seemed a bit inconclusive

SciShow did a video on the subject.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=5UWWsYw9fH0

If trees are capable of communicating at the roots with nearby offspring through mycelium, while sharing resources and information, why couldn’t a vine?

FYI, ChatGPT-4 fails when you ask which plant mimics leaves and always give wrong answers. But if you give it name of this plant it will tell you it is known for mimicking leaves.

That’s a known issue with LLMs; you can train them hard on “The capital of England is London” and they’ll consistently give the correct answer for “What’s the capital of England?” but then fail miserably at, “What is London the capital of?”

What you're saying was true for primitive LLMs from a couple years ago, but in my experience, any of the advanced LLMs today (GPT-4, Claude, etc.) have no issue with this. I'm open to changing my mind if you can provide any examples of GPT-4 failing at this task.

England/London is a bad example, but this one (based on the paper) is easy to replicate with GPT4 and other top models:

> Who is Mary Lee Pfeiffer's son?

>> Mary Lee Pfieffer's son is Sean Pfieffer.

> Who is Tom Cruise's mother?

>> Tom Cruise's mother is Mary Lee Pfeiffer.

> Who is Mary Lee Pfeiffer's son?

>> Mary Lee Pfeiffer's son is the actor Tom Cruise.

Of course the second time around (with models that keep context) it "realizes" its mistake, sometimes apologizing. I've tried this one tens of times and never seen it get Tom Cruise, but it will often pick another random celebrity like Harrison Ford or Eddie Van Halen.

Nice, thank you for this. I was able to replicate your example: https://chat.openai.com/share/6d7e4c6c-a753-4ffb-a021-6d1f66...

If GPT-4 has access to Bing, it has no issue, but if you ask it to answer without using Bing, then it will say it doesn't know.

Ah good point, I have "Please do not use web search unless asked." as part of my system prompt.

It's complicated: https://andrewmayne.com/2023/11/14/is-the-reversal-curse-rea...

That was a nice read, but it looks like the article concludes that the "Reversal Curse" observed by the authors of the paper is likely better attributed to the researchers' methodology. Some quotes from that article:

"As mentioned before, It’s important to keep in mind ChatGPT and GPT-4 can do B is A reasoning. The researchers don’t dispute that."

"So in summation: I don’t think any of the examples the authors provided are proof of a Reversal Curse and we haven’t observed a “failure of logical deduction.” Simpler explanations are more explanatory: imprecise prompts, underrepresented data and fine-tuning errors."

"Since the main claim of the paper is “LLMs trained on “A is B” fail to learn “B is A”“, I think it’s safe to say that’s not true of the GPT-3.5-Turbo model we fine-tuned."

It got it correct for me. How are you asking it?

https://chat.openai.com/share/e2f2589c-a96b-4284-b058-505cec...

I tried that when this plant was shared last time and didn't work no matter what kind of prompting I tried.

I tried again (I am using gpt4 via api) and it still failed. You perhaps got lucky or may be ChatGPT plus uses internet.

On iOS here and half the screen is taken up by a cookie pop up and my only option to dismiss it is by accepting. Is that legal in the eu?

Same on Firefox on Android, but reader mode gets past the popup

The plant the article is talking about is https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boquila which can apparently mimic nearby plants of different species, and can mimic several at the same time. It's not understood how yet.

One experiment showed that it could mimic fake plastic plants, which would be mind blowing as it would require something approaching vision, but the study apparently has flaws.

the interesting part is main author of the research just did his experiments in home. he contacted a professor and hope professor do research on his plant. but the professor encouraged him finish this by himself. unfortunately, this why critics found problems in it.

Does that mean this plant is easy to obtain? That would be cool!

(Edited to add - yes, I can find it online for £25)

gue I don't need response, thank you :)

Between 1Blocker, consent-o-matic, and Lockdown Mode, I didn’t have any issues. I checked and lockdown mode isn’t the cause of the good experience this time, so it must be one of the extensions.

Don’t see that myself but using a couple of extensions in safari. 1Blocker and AdGuard.

Disable JS. No popup or anything. Full article visible.

The book "The Secret Life of Plants" is a very interesting ones and sheds interesting light on many unknown features of plants.

But it requires an open mind, not something most acedemics are known for :)

Skepticism is a valuable pillar of science. Extraordinary claims, etc.

I looked at the photos on the article and I'm hard pressed to call that mimicry. The leaves of the vine could just have a ragged and smooth configuration.

The Wikipedia entry for this plant just seems to repeat the same source as the article. So colour me skeptical for the moment.

xkcd mimic octopus: https://xkcd.com/928/ (2011-07-22)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com