Recordings reveal that plants make ultrasonic squeals when stressed (Paywall)
Although it has been revealed in recent years that plants are capable of seeing, hearing and smelling, they are still usually thought of as silent. But now, for the first time, they have been recorded making airborne sounds when stressed, which researchers say could open up a new field of precision agriculture where farmers listen for water-starved crops.
Itzhak Khait and his colleagues at Tel Aviv University in Israel found that tomato and tobacco plants made sounds at frequencies humans cannot hear when stressed by a lack of water or when their stem is cut.
PLAN IT OF THE GRAPES (December 10)
What if you heard a vegetable scream?
(Or a fish say, “I can not breathe”?)
Would you be perplexed?
Would you be distressed?
Or, panda-like, would you eat, shoot and leave?
What if everything living expressed
discomfort, pain and dismay?
Would you be bothered or would you rather
say, “Sorry” and be on your way?
Rhetorical questions. Obviously.
Your survival is all that counts.
No plant or animal (and surely no person)
outside yourself could ever amount
to a cause for concern. A lesson soon learned,
unless one passes away. The strongest, the fittest,
the quickest witted, instinctively cover their ass anyway.
In sum, life's lesson turns out to be:
ain't nothing counts if it ain't me.