Do not look at the silence of the plants that we worry about while watering and sometimes pour our hearts out. Plants have been discovered to make sounds in response to being picked or watered, but it’s nothing like the sounds you and I make.
According to research, plants really scream when we harm them, but we have never heard of them until now. Because the frequencies they emit during intense stress are in ranges that the human ear cannot hear.
The sounds that plants make, even though we cannot hear them, are one of the ways they show their stress.
Even in the area we consider to be the quietest, there are sounds at frequencies that the human ear cannot hear. Biologist Lilac Hadany from Tel Aviv University said that there are animals that can hear these sounds, but it is almost impossible for humans to hear them. It must be one of the ways that living things in nature interact with each other.
Organisms that interact with plants, insects, and other animals, such as other living things. They often use their voices to interact with the creatures around them. Especially when under stress, plants do not stay as passive as we think. They change color and shape, emit strong odors around them.
These physiological changes made by plants can be considered as a kind of defense mechanism.
It was stated that this change of plants was for the purpose of protecting and defending themselves. However, apart from physiological changes, it was discovered that plants can make sounds. Lilach Hadany and her colleagues discovered that plants can detect sounds. To find out exactly, they used tomato and tobacco plants as test subjects.
The first group of subjects were watered and uncut plants. To get a basic understanding, they conducted this experiment first in a stress-free environment, i.e. a soundproof room, and then in a greenhouse environment. The second group of subjects were cut and dehydrated plants. They also observed these plants in a soundproof room and then in a greenhouse environment.
It has been observed that plants in a stressful environment create sound waves with a radius exceeding 1 meter in frequency ranges that the human ear cannot hear. We can think of this sound as an explosion or a clicking sound. Plants emitting an average of 40 clicks per hour, increased this noise as the stress continued. Plants that were not exposed to stress did not react at all and continued their normal processes.
With the algorithm they used, Hadany and his colleagues discovered that not only tomato and tobacco plants, but also other plants (wheat, corn, grapes, cactus, etc.) make different sounds.
There are of course incomplete aspects of this exciting research. At the moment, the source of the sounds that plants make is not yet clear. The effects of other stress environments (extreme heat and other adverse conditions) on plants are still the subject of research.
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