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Stressed Plants Are Sounding Alarms But Are We Listening?
Amazing advances in detecting previously unheard sounds from plants are telling us a new story about their existence and “emotions.”
A while back, I wrote an article on carrots and how they might react when pulled from the ground. Some people found it interesting, others found it too wild for anything but science fiction. But remember “Little Shop of Horrors” and what that plant did? If you’d care to read my original article, the link is here.
According to a recent study by Tel Aviv University researchers, plants under stress create airborne sounds that provide information about their physiological state. In an acoustic room and greenhouse, the study captured the ultrasonic noises that tomato and tobacco plants produced.
Using these recordings, machine learning models were created that could determine the health of the plants purely from the sounds they produced. The researchers believe that using these sounds in agriculture to monitor plants may have ramifications for understanding how plants interact with their surroundings. The results provide fresh perspectives on plant bioacoustics and the potential use of sound in plant signaling. How else might this research help us understand our environment?
