Zoe Schlanger

"teeming with fascinating and enlightening insights" Observer A narrative investigation into the new science of plant intelligence and sentience, from National Association of Science Writers Award winner and Livingston Award finalist Zoe Schlanger. Look at the green organism across the room or through the window: the potted plant, or the grass or a tree. Think how a life spent constantly growing yet rooted in a single spot comes with tremendous challenges. To meet them, plants have come up with some of the most creative methods for surviving of any living thing - us included. Many are so ingenious that they seem nearly impossible. Did you know plants can communicate when they are being eaten, allowing nearby plants to bolster their defences? They move and that movement stops when they are anaesthetised. They also use electricity for internal communication. They can hear the sounds of caterpillars eating. Plants can remember the last time they have been visited by a bee and how many times they have been visited - so they have a concept of time and can count. Plants can not only communicate with each other, they can also communicate with other species of plants and animals, allowing them to manipulate animals to defend or fertilise them. So look again at the potted plant, or the grass or the tree and wonder: are plants intelligent? Or perhaps ask an even more fundamental question: are they conscious? The Light Eaters will completely redefine how you think about plants. Packed with the most amazing stories of the life of plants it will open your eyes to the extraordinary green life forms we share the planet with.

How the New Science of Plant Intelligence Expands Our View of Life on Earth

The Light Eaters

Fascinating research is being done in plant science!!! Also tomatoes can release a chemical that caterpillars will eat that causes them to cannibalize each other!! Plants are crazy!!!

Jonnie

And it could be wildly useful to agriculture, if scientists can find the right application. After all, in Appel's work, a sound cue caused the plant to make its own pesticide. If plants could be made to produce pesticides through simply playing sounds to them, it could reduce or eliminate the need for synthetic pesticides on farms, and in some cases increase the level of compounds that the crop in question is grown for. In a crop like mustard, for example, the plants' own pesticide is the very thing it is farmed for—mustard oil. Putting a lavender bush on high alert by playing the right sounds would cause it to make more of the defensive compounds we prize in lavender oil.

Researchers globally have tried to see if playing certain tones to plants can prompt them to certain actions. They experiment with various frequencies for different lengths of time. Right now, the research on tones is rather scattershot. One study found that playing arabidopsis a series of tones for three hours per day over ten days increased its ability to fight off a harmful fungal infection. Another found that playing some tones to rice for an hour improved the plant's ability to survive drought conditions. And researchers who played tones at different frequencies to alfalfa sprouts for two hours saw that they increased the plants content of vitamin C, which means their nutritional value went up. When they repeated the experiment with broccoli and radish sprouts, they managed to increase their content of flavonoids too. One can imagine a future where farmers set up boom boxes instead of crop dusters.

This is what it's like to know me. I feel such kinship with the author in this single passage.

Consider the emerald green sea slug. When I first read about it, I couldn't stop talking about it with anyone who asked what was going on with me lately. The green sea slug, this whimsical thing that seemed to defy all boundaries between plant and animal, was going on with me. It was all I could think about.

It is hard to underestimate the drama of being a tree, or any plant.

The Light Eaters quotes

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