I came across an article the other day regarding a study done seemingly proving that moths can hear plants. If appears that plants give off ultrasonic sounds - healthy plants about one a minute and plants in distress much more frequently. The female moths hear the plant sounds and will avoid laying their eggs on distressed plants. There’s a whole world going on between trees, insects and other organisms that we have been totally unaware of until recently.
Moths hear plants
- Thread starter dbonsaiw
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Wires_Guy_wires
Imperial Masterpiece
Just wait until you hear about Volatile Organic Compounds and the way plants interact with microbes, fungi and even birds through chemical signaling! Visual signaling is also cool, but only visible in the dark under UV. Heat signaling is even cooler, but also more difficult to see without a heat cam.
With a stethoscope you should be able to hear the sapflow of larger trees, and I've heard about people reporting even hearing the microbursts in big conifers.
Animals like spittlebugs and some cicadas can use plant tissue as an amplifier.
Let's see if this works, here's two people discussing screaming plants:
With a stethoscope you should be able to hear the sapflow of larger trees, and I've heard about people reporting even hearing the microbursts in big conifers.
Animals like spittlebugs and some cicadas can use plant tissue as an amplifier.
Let's see if this works, here's two people discussing screaming plants:
My mind is blown. I did not know that the smell of cut grass is "plants screaming". I'm going to check out some of their other podcasts on the ride home.
Wires_Guy_wires
Imperial Masterpiece
Happy to be of service!
Since I'm typing about plant signaling anyways, a fun piece of chemistry lore about the people who first synthesized "the smell of cucumber". I don't know if it's true, but in the lab world this story is often used to force people to think about what they are about to do.
The story is as follows: Some scientists were investigating the compounds produced by cucumber and how to recreate those. In theory, it was pretty simple: degrade some fatty acids and cleave them. Since fine chemistry was not really a thing in the 1970's, these guys drew out the synthesis of (E,Z)-2,6-Nonadienal and started working on their bench. This chemical has a smell threshold in humans of 0.1 parts per billion. And these guys made roughly a billionbillion parts of a material that gasses off as easy as a fart. The story goes that people six cities over could smell it and they were banned from the lab for a while.
Not sure if that is true, I highly doubt it, but my chemistry teacher sure made clear to us that we do things in small volumes for a reason, and we work in the carbon-filtered fume hood so we can do fun stuff while not bothering others. And also he forced us to do calculations on how much perfume someone would need to cover the entire world. It was not much..
The typical banana smell (isoamyl acetate) is easy to reproduce in a lab, about as easy as aspirin.. And I've had an accident with it, causing my lab journal to smell like banana candy for about five years. The detection threshold is way higher though, which is why very few people notice that cheese also contains this chemical naturally.
Both of these chemicals have effects on plants, but they're not studied a lot. Jasmonates though, are highly interesting. First found in Jasmin plants (the name could give it away) scientists found that almost all plants produce it in response to stress, and almost all plants respond to it in a stress-manner. When researching compounds that plants use for defense, like caffeine, nicotine and even cocaine, it was found that these compounds increase if the plant is receiving jasmonate signals. My memory is failing me, but I believe this is also the chemical that causes plants in the savannah to increase their toxin levels when plants are browsing them - killing off huge herds if they were fenced together with just a single plant population.
Since I'm typing about plant signaling anyways, a fun piece of chemistry lore about the people who first synthesized "the smell of cucumber". I don't know if it's true, but in the lab world this story is often used to force people to think about what they are about to do.
The story is as follows: Some scientists were investigating the compounds produced by cucumber and how to recreate those. In theory, it was pretty simple: degrade some fatty acids and cleave them. Since fine chemistry was not really a thing in the 1970's, these guys drew out the synthesis of (E,Z)-2,6-Nonadienal and started working on their bench. This chemical has a smell threshold in humans of 0.1 parts per billion. And these guys made roughly a billionbillion parts of a material that gasses off as easy as a fart. The story goes that people six cities over could smell it and they were banned from the lab for a while.
Not sure if that is true, I highly doubt it, but my chemistry teacher sure made clear to us that we do things in small volumes for a reason, and we work in the carbon-filtered fume hood so we can do fun stuff while not bothering others. And also he forced us to do calculations on how much perfume someone would need to cover the entire world. It was not much..
The typical banana smell (isoamyl acetate) is easy to reproduce in a lab, about as easy as aspirin.. And I've had an accident with it, causing my lab journal to smell like banana candy for about five years. The detection threshold is way higher though, which is why very few people notice that cheese also contains this chemical naturally.
Both of these chemicals have effects on plants, but they're not studied a lot. Jasmonates though, are highly interesting. First found in Jasmin plants (the name could give it away) scientists found that almost all plants produce it in response to stress, and almost all plants respond to it in a stress-manner. When researching compounds that plants use for defense, like caffeine, nicotine and even cocaine, it was found that these compounds increase if the plant is receiving jasmonate signals. My memory is failing me, but I believe this is also the chemical that causes plants in the savannah to increase their toxin levels when plants are browsing them - killing off huge herds if they were fenced together with just a single plant population.
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