Once Considered Outlandish, the Idea That Plants Help Their Relatives is Taking Root (sciencemag.org) 119
An anonymous reader shares a report: A Canadian biologist planted the seed of the idea more than a decade ago, but many plant biologists regarded it as heretical -- plants lack the nervous systems that enable animals to recognize kin, so how can they know their relatives? But with a series of recent findings, the notion that plants really do care for their most genetically close peers -- in a quiet, plant-y way -- is taking root.
. Some species constrain how far their roots spread, others change how many flowers they produce, and a few tilt or shift their leaves to minimize shading of neighboring plants, favoring related individuals.
"We need to recognize that plants not only sense whether it's light or dark or if they've been touched, but also whom they are interacting with," says Susan Dudley, a plant evolutionary ecologist at McMaster University in Hamilton, Canada, whose early plant kin recognition studies sparked the interest of many scientists. Beyond broadening views of plant behavior, the new work may have a practical side. In September 2018, a team in China reported that rice planted with kin grows better, a finding that suggested family ties can be exploited to improve crop yields. "It seems anytime anyone looks for it, they find a kin effect," says Andre Kessler, a chemical ecologist at Cornell University.
"We need to recognize that plants not only sense whether it's light or dark or if they've been touched, but also whom they are interacting with," says Susan Dudley, a plant evolutionary ecologist at McMaster University in Hamilton, Canada, whose early plant kin recognition studies sparked the interest of many scientists. Beyond broadening views of plant behavior, the new work may have a practical side. In September 2018, a team in China reported that rice planted with kin grows better, a finding that suggested family ties can be exploited to improve crop yields. "It seems anytime anyone looks for it, they find a kin effect," says Andre Kessler, a chemical ecologist at Cornell University.
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I wonder if we did similar studies with human ethnic populations what we might find.
Quite possibly something rather different to what we might find if we did similar studies with fairly small human families.
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Reported science (popular science) is often about single, small group trials. Basically, if you see a science article in mainstream media that seems too good to be true, or highly unusual, check into the background of it before investing in it.
Re: It goes beyond that. (Score:2)
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The brain doesn't need much glucose to function, medicinal science isn't about nutrition and nutritional pathways in the human mechanism, unsupported crap from ACs (whose brains need very little glucose) belong in Trump speeches not in slashdot posts.
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No, one can't have chemical dependence on sugars. You are simply crazy.
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Not science as a whole, but parts of it, yes. Take for example stomach ulcers. In the 1980s of course ulcers were caused by stress (how?) and spicy food (even though billions of people eat spicy every day and they don't get stomach ulcers.)
And this "science" was so thoroughly accepted that no questions were asked when pills were prescribed by the barrel to control stomach acid. Congratulations, you have tools that can modify the inner workings of the human body that so far was able to digest food on its o
Re: Irony (Score:2)
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TED (Score:4, Informative)
I've heard something eerie similar on TED quite a lot time ago: Suzanne Simard: How trees talk to each other | TED Talk [ted.com], and Greg Gage: Electrical experiments with plants that count and communicate | TED Talk [ted.com]. There are many other TED talks about the topic of plants' nervous system, intelligence and communication. This kinda invalidates the whole premise of vegetarianism but I don't want to argue about that now.
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This kinda invalidates the whole premise of vegetarianism
No it doesn't, as eating plant based food rarely means destroying/killing the plant. Or do you cut down an apple tree if you want to harvest the apples?
Re:TED (Score:4, Interesting)
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So regularly harvesting your testicles would be okay, so long as they grow back within a year or two, almost to their former size and glory?
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No it doesn't, as eating plant based food rarely means destroying/killing the plant. Or do you cut down an apple tree if you want to harvest the apples?
Give me your arm, I want to eat it! You'll be fine, you have another one and people live perfectly well with one or zero arms. Don't be greedy.
And I don't know about saying rarely. Harvesting an awful lot of veggies entails destruction of the whole plant. Perhaps we should be more concerned about treating plants more humanely and letting them roam instead of constraining them with fences and such.
Skullgluten (Score:2)
A fruit is basically just a green or red/orange/yellow fetus that you can pluck and peel with a pairing knife.
You think the plants don't care because they don't reflexively cover their nads whenever anyone shows up with a baseball and a baseball bat? That they exist in pure vegetative bliss, like a steer happily chewing his cud, wondering what all the fuss is about?
You need to think a little bit harder about vegetative value
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Thats a fruit. Vegetables are the whole plant or a criticsl part that destroys the plant. Asparagus, broccoli, cauliflower, eggplant, potatoes, turnips, carrots, do I really need to keep going?
Your usually eating the roots (potatoes, radishes, turnips, carrots,etc)
Or your eating tge tops (letuces, broccoli, etc)
Even legumes end up killing the whole plant to harvest.
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Wait, what? Your point still sort of stands, however your examples are a tad askew...
Eggplants are fruit. And neither harvesting them, nor beans ("legumes"), kills the host plant.
Roots can also frequently be harvested without killing the whole organism. They can asexually sprout nodules, which in turn grow into edible produce (which is still considered part of the original organism).
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http://wiki.uqm.stack.nl/Supox... [stack.nl]
You don't kill the tree when you pick an apple (Score:3)
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The more cruelly the animal is killed, the more acceptable it is to vegetarians.
Most cruel -- animals killing and eating alive other animals
Then, subsitence hunting by bushmen
Then, western hunters
Then, factory machine quick kills.
You can quibble about the middle two's order, but not the ends.
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Jains.
If plants are sentient creatures (Score:2)
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"Feed me, Seymour!"
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Re:If plants are sentient creatures (Score:5, Insightful)
Jokes aside nobody's suggestion plants are sentient, just that they seem to have behaviors that favor similar plants. That could just as easily be an evolved survival mechanism. Plants still don't have central nervous systems.
Though I do think it would be cool in a sci-fi sort of way to evolve beyond the need for consuming living organisms. That said, we ain't there, and while I eat a mostly vegetarian diet it's for health reasons, not for the sake of animals. I've got a dog for Pete's sake, and I ain't feeding her carrots.
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Worms have a distributed nervous system with no brain, and they react to their environment in a very similar way as creates that have a centralized system. So it might not present the dividing line that is generally presumed.
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If you want to succumb to darwinism. Survival of the fittest. If you limit yourself to scavenging you’re going to be one of the weak, sickly creatures they get picked off by the faster predator. Plants kill other plants, and when they dont, They still feed on the dead remains of former plants. Ultimately your choice is to either perish or accept that you will always have to kill something in order to survive.
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Do they *only* reach out in that direction? Or is it only the vines that manage to find something to grab on to that thrive?
Grass (Score:2)
How and why do you think grasses evolved?
Still considered outlandish (Score:1)
But we managed to get some magazine to publish it, and that’s all that matters.
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These aren't conscious efforts. Sentience is a form of specialized nerve awareness
Neither consciousness nor sentience have objective definitions. Neither phenomena has an actual physical explanation.
Thus, you cannot determine what is or is not conscious, sentient, etc.
well if trump voters (Score:2, Funny)
Can recognize each other, why not vegetables? After all they are more intelligent.
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Must be embarrassing to be outsmarted into the Trump presidency by a minority population of vegetable intelligence.
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Can recognize each other, why not vegetables? After all they are more intelligent.
Hmm, so maybe Trump voters actually are vegetables? Interesting theory. I saw we start eating them and find out.
It's long been known... (Score:5, Interesting)
... that at the very least, many plants attack their foes. Many plants produce chemicals in their roots or leaf litter that hinder plant growth or seed germination but which they themselves are immune to. And when I say "long known", observations of such allelopathathic effects date back to at least Theophrastus in 300 BC, and most agricultural societies have long had rules about how "Plant A will grow well with B but poorly with C", which can generally be seen as allelopathy. In research, most cases of concern are where weeds produce chemicals that hinder commercial crops, but it also works the other way around - for example, rice (which they mention above) creates root exudates hinder the germination of competing seedlings.
Of course, there are non-chemical ways (such as shade, root growth, etc) to hinder foes without hurting yourself or your brethren, but the chemical ways are usually the most striking, as their purposes are so unambiguous. While shade, root growth, etc can be natural consequences of your own development, you don't invest energy in producing secondary metabolites unless you want them to accomplish something with them.
Old news (Score:2)
Animal parks have long known that trees who get nibbled at by giraffes and other wild animals go hungry, because the trees alarm their relatives and all of them begin to send bitter poisons into their leaves, making them inedible. If they can't leave the park they die.
white men are the only social creatures (Score:1)
always remember:
white men are the only beings capable of loving their children.
white people are the only beings capable of loving their children.
men are the only beings capable of loving their children.
humans are the only beings capable of loving their children.
no, wait, scratch that. only white arian humans.
ok, it really needs to be all humans again.
mammals are the only beings capable of loving their children (or feeling pain, for that matter).
warm-blooded...
vertebrates...
animals...
now plants.
Are plants r
Clones? (Score:2)
Imagine what all those cloned Cannabis plants are saying to each other? Probably something about where the hell are all the men?
Vegans and plant feelings (Score:3)
If this research means that plants have a degree of sentience, will killing plants be seen as exploitive?
There is commentary elsewhere in this thread that vegans could still eat fruit and nuts, because these are 'given' by plants as a reproductive attractant, not requiring death of the plant.
However, I see a big BUT coming. The difference between vegans and vegetarians is that vegetarians eat products nonlethally derived from animals, such as honey and dairy. Vegans consider these products to be 'exploiting' animals, so they are off the plate. The most advanced and morally pure vegan logicians are going to argue, how is an apple different from the milk of a cow? Because Nature intends that apples be eaten by animals that will derive nutrition from the apple while spreading its seeds, humans would be depriving the apple tree's ally species of this natural nutrient. Furthermore, very few apples consumed by humans result in natural apple propagation.
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As long as you poop outside in the dirt like Americans do in national parks, it's fine.
But I think you'll find every vegan admits to being morally imperfect, and merely wishes to minimize the harm of their diet to the degree they personally find practical. Everyone has an ecological footprint, carbon emissions, steps on the occasional ant, etc. It's irrational to suggest that the impossibility of doing no harm means people can't make choices about which times of harm they personally feel like participating
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As a vegan of almost 30yrs, I'd say this: even if plants were sentient (which is a pretty far stretch by all accounts), eating them directly is still much better than eating animals if this is your concern. If a typical stat is that it take 12lbs of grain to produce 1lb of meat, eating animals contributes to significantly more plants being 'murdered', so it's still better (causes less harm) to just eat plants.
Further, the definition of veganism is explicitly states "animals", not 'sentient life', so even if
Soil Microbiome (Score:2)
Most plants also (quite literally) feed the soil microbiome by producing sugars and other nutrients that bacteria and fungi absorb. The microorganisms return the favor by fixing nitrogen, for plants that don't do that themselves, as well as defending the roots from non-friendly microorganisms, and probably a whole host of other things that we don't even know about yet: perhaps even participating in the communication network that plants use to help identify clones vs. same-species neighbors vs. other plants
Irrelevant: "plants lack nervous system ... " (Score:2)
Whatever behavior, with forethought or not, with nervous system or not, with mobility and motor functions or not, that helped one set of alleles to survive better than others out competed the
STOP EATING PLANTS, YOU BARBARIANS! (Score:1)
Yet more proof that plants, are living, breathing, thinking, feeling creatures!
And yet we devour billions of them every day. Worse yet, they are often still alive when they are eaten!
Unconscionable!
At least meat-eaters kill their food first.
Stop the madness! Join PETP (pet-pee) today!