Is the sound part real? What frequencies are used to communicate stress? Is this in range of anything I could connect to a raspberry pico or arduino? My flowers desperately need answers :D
This is real! We started our startup based on this principle. Do note that these emissions do not occur often, think about up to 10-100 per hours in stress states. For a small background read, read this (not our research): https://www.cell.com/cell/fulltext/S0092-8674(23)00262-3
If you are interested I recommend using a MEMS microphone, sampling at 384 or 500 kHz and triggering at frequencies between 20-200 kHz.
There is several people who have made these solutions for detecting bats using pico's: https://www.geeky-gadgets.com/raspberry-pi-bat-detector-17-0...
If you want something off the shelf look into something like this: https://batsound.com/
I think I must be misreading. If one wants to detect these signals being emitted by plants, why is 10–100 per hour not often? I'd think that having to wait 6 minutes, or, to play it safe, even an hour would still be way more informative than finding out about the stress only when its effects were visible to the eye.
It's known that fungi can act as a trading point for plants in that lend some, borrow some when plants are in need. If you hook fungi to a device you can measure communication.
"Trees can communicate with each other through networks in soil. Much like social networks or neural networks, the fungal mycelia of mycorrhizas allow signals to be sent between trees in a forest. These mycorrhizal networks are effectively an information highway, with recent studies demonstrating the exchange of nutritional resources, defence signals and allelochemicals. Sensing and responding to networked signals elicits complex behavioural responses in plants. This ability to communicate ('tree talk') is a foundational process in forest ecosystems."
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4497361/
And would highly recommend this book: https://www.merlinsheldrake.com/entangled-life
> exchange of nutritional resources, defence signals and allelochemicals
Only one of these three things qualifies as "information" in my book (defence signals). How is this an "information highway"?
But fungi do more than that. They transfer energy and life resources along the network too. Just as a highway carries cargo.
It's just a metaphor.
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/03/30/science/plant-sounds-stre...
> To be clear, the sounds made by harried plants are not the same as the anxious mumbling you might utter if you have a big deadline at work. The researchers suspect the nervous, popping noise is instead a byproduct of cavitation, when tiny bubbles burst and produce mini-shock waves inside the plant’s vascular system, not unlike what happens in your joints when you crack your knuckles.
It’s the equivalent of stepping on a twig and knowing how dry it was based on the sound of the snap it makes.
https://www.kariega.co.za/blog/do-giraffe-make-trees-talk-to...
It's cute, I like it, I'd tell my kid it.
But I don't think active communication is a useful way to describe every single process where one's action causes another's reaction.
I would recommend familiarizing yourself with information theory and systems theory.
From the opening line on the Wikipedia article for Communication:
> Communication is commonly defined as the transmission of information. Its precise definition is disputed and there are disagreements about whether unintentional or failed transmissions are included and whether communication not only transmits meaning but also creates it.
If you argue from a position ignorant of information theory, it might seem that a knee jerk is not communication. But read through Shannon's A Mathematical Theory of Communication and you will understand differently.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communication
> Another interpretation is given by communication theorists Claude Shannon and Warren Weaver, who characterize communication as a transmission of information brought about by the interaction of several components, such as a source, a message, an encoder, a channel, a decoder, and a receiver.[17] *The transmission view is rejected by transactional and constitutive views, which hold that communication is not just about the transmission of information but also about the creation of meaning.* (emphasis mine)
I’ll go one step further and say that I don’t think the Shannon definition of communication applies to physical responses to external stimuli (reflexive knee response, signals produced by plants when cut), or signals produced by chemical reactions (light given off the stars or suns).
Induced reactions or chemical changes are not communication per se because the meaning of the transmitted signal would not exist without an observer as there’s no internal mechanism which creates the signal without the observer.
In cell to cell communication, for example, a cell will create signals without the existence of another cell to interpret those signals. If a second cell picks up those signals, then it’s receiving communication. If however the second cell produces a stimulus to invoke a response from the first cell, the signal received would not have existed without the observer. In this sense, I think communication depends on the ability to transmit information without the provocation of observers or receivers, which is especially meaningful for biological systems because the signals they convey determine their survival.
By simply existing does not mean something is communicating (sun or stars), and reacting to external stimuli does not represent communication per se, only signaling.
This one, for example, picks up to 200kHz for €1050:
I hope it doesn't go all the way to 200khz. Consumer audio can go up to a 192kHz sampling rate, which can't even record 100 kHz sounds.
It seems the equipment will be costly.
That's probably because the Nyquist frequency (the maximum frequency that can theoretically be reproduced) is 96 kHZ at 192 kHz sampling, but the aliasing for that frequency is going to so terrible and unpredictable (what is the likelihood that always sample the max point in the sine wave) that you wouldn't consider anything close to the Nyquist frequency. You might get something workable for 20 kHz (~10 samples per cycle), which is the edge of human hearing, so that quiet overtones / high frequencies in percussion like cymbals show up.
If this is getting used to identify problems based on sound signature, not just "hey, the FFT shows a spike at 100 kHz", 10 samples is probably a bit low. So 1 MHz sampling rate at a minimum for 100 kHz.