Sally Adee at Noema Magazine:
By the turn of the 21st century, however, a renegade group of plant physiologists had had enough. They argued that it was past time to bring existing theories of plant behavior into line with the avalanche of new observations enabled by late 20th-century advances in molecular biology, genomics, ecology and neurophysiology. Perhaps they weren’t reading anyone’s mind, but it sure started to look like plants had (some version of) their own.
Among many findings that precipitated the revolt and have proliferated since: Plants can sense — and with a bigger sensory suite than the one humans have. More importantly, they can integrate the information those senses carry and use it to make decisions. For example, the molecular biologist Edward Farmer and his colleagues at the University of Lausanne in Switzerland found in a 2000 study that Arabidopsis (the main model organism in plant physiology studies) markedly alters its hormone response depending on the size of a caterpillar munching on its leaves. When the attacker is small, the strategy is to keep them that way. “It’s better to be eaten by something small than by something big,” Farmer told me. And so, when attacked, “the leaf makes itself harder to eat” by producing toxic chemicals and proteins that interfere with digestion.
more here.
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