Plants Can Tell When They’re Being Eaten Eating a leaf off a plant may not kill it, but that doesnt mean the plant likes it. The newest study to examine the intelligence (or at least behavior) of plants finds that plants can tell when theyre being eaten -- and send out defenses to stop it from happening. We’ve been hearing for decades about the complex intelligence of plants; last year’s excellent New Yorker piece is a good place to start, if you want to learn more about the subject. But a new study, conducted by researchers at the University of Missouri, managed to figure out one new important element: plants can tell when they’re being eaten, and they don’t like it. The word “intelligence,” when applied to any non-human animal or plant, is imprecise and sort of meaningless; research done to determine “intelligence” mostly just aims to learn how similar the inner workings of another organism is to a human thought process. There’s certainly nothing evolutionarily important about these sorts of intelligence studies; a chimp is not superior to a chicken just because chimps can use tools the same way humans do. But these studies are fascinating, and do give us insight into how other organisms think and behave, whatever “think” might mean. modernfarmer/2014/10/plants-can-tell-theyre-eaten/
Posted on: Sun, 26 Oct 2014 15:55:04 +0000
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