Plant Talk

I guess this goes here. So I'm no botanist, and have a question.


Mod Edit: (spoiler alert) Please skip the following if you have not seen a very recent apocalyptic film. The thread topic is plants can talk. (spoiler alert)




My GF and I were watching *snipped name of movie* last night, and after the movie was over, she informed me that plants could indeed talk. She's a lot more smarter than I.

So, if anyone has any good info on this could they paste or link me to it? I would be very appreciative.

Pz

edit: For more...

And not just to the same species, but as a whole, like Maya or something. Is this true?

[edit on 20-10-2008 by susp3kt]

Mod Edit: All replies will remain on topic. Please do not comment on the edit.

[edit on 20-10-2008 by TheBandit795]

There was something in the Celestine Prophecy about a study they did that plants can determine human intent.

I don't know about plants "talking", but I can tell you that I've read some interesting things. In "A language older than words" Derrick Jensen tells about a scientist (or some profession like that, it's been awhile since i read the book)..
Oh yeah, it was the guy who invented the Lie Detector. He hooked the lie detector to some plants that they had in the lab, and when something would occur, the plants would react. For example, he took a pot of shrimp and placed them in a sink. When he started to run scalding hot water over the shrimp, the plants reacted to the pain of the shrimp. In addition, he also set one of the plants on fire.
The sad thing is that modern science can't prove this, due to the routine methods required in science. You can't just think "oh, I'm gonna set this plant on fire". You have to actually MEAN to do the action in order to get a reaction from the plants. And you can't just pretend either. You really have to have full intention of harming the plant.
Somewhere down the line, this experiment was transfered to human sperm and how plants react to it being harmed, which they did. Now we know that sperm all the way across the country reacts when the person they came from is harmed.
Hope this helps a bit, but I'd really recommend you read the above mentioned book for more detail. It really will change the way you look at the world around you.

hi, I remember back when I was in college reading some articles about how fungi communicate. The articles explained that fungi communicate a bit differently than we do because they communicate chemically with each other. It's been 15-20 years since I read these articles, but what I remember is that their chemical communication helped them in terms of perpetuating as a species.

I'm getting ready to run out the door, so I don't have time to try to hunt down some of this on the web for you, but I'll see what I can find later. In the meantime, you might try doing some different online searches like plants + chemical communication and/or fungus + chemical communication.

I sure wish I could remember where I read those articles, but I know the first article I read was in some kind of science magazine. From there, I followed the various references cited in that article.

I remember it was such an exciting subject for me to read about because ever since I was a child, I always had some kind of feeling/sense that plants could communicate with each other. Every time I plucked a tomato off a vine or pulled a leaf off a tree (I had ambivalent feelings about doing both), I wondered what the plants sensed or felt.

Anyway, I'm so glad you brought this up because I want to study this area further again. The concept of plants communicating, albeit chemically, is very exciting to me! Anyway, I'll see what I can dig up later today.

You can find some interesting information here. The part of this article which deals with how plants communicate can be found if you scroll down some and look for the heading (which the author has in all caps) called: "Communication To Construct Intelligent Networks".

Here's another article (a very short one) about how plants communicate.

There's some more information about the communication of plants and fungus on Wikipedia. Just scroll down to the bold heading called "Plants and fungi" and read that section. Directly below that, you'll see a heading called "Sources." I would suggest that you go to your local library to see if you can find sources #3 and #4:

3) Witzany, G. (2006 ) Plant Communication from Biosemiotic Perspective. Plant Signaling & Behavior 1(4): 169-178. 4) Witzany, G. (2007 ). Applied Biosemiotics: Fungal Communication. In: Witzany, G. (Ed.) Biosemiotics in Transdisciplinary Contexts. Helsinki. Umweb, pp 295-301.

Those two sources look like they will have a lot of good information on how plants and fungi communicate.

Find a copy of "The Secret LIfe of Plants," it goes in depth about experiments showing botanical communication and memory.