Posted by:
torturednevermo
(
)
Date: June 20, 2015 02:57AM
Henry, regarding your last comment, consider these quotes:
“Farmer and Ryan worked with local sagebrush, which produce copious amounts of methyl jasmonate, an airborne organic chemical that Ryan thought plants were using to ward off insect herbivores. In their experiment, when damaged sagebrush leaves were put into airtight jars with potted tomato plants, the tomatoes began producing proteinase inhibitors — compounds that harm insects by disrupting their digestion.”
“He repeated Farmer’s experiment in the wild. When he clipped sagebrush plants, imitating the injuries caused by the sharp teeth of insects and inducing the plants to produce methyl jasmonate and other airborne chemicals, the wild tobacco nearby started pumping out the defensive enzyme polyphenol oxidase. This seemed to have real consequences. At the end of the season, these tobacco plants had much less leaf damage than others from grasshoppers and cutworms.”
The research seems to indicate that plants are using chemicals released from damaged leaves to *warn* nearby plants of insect invasions, allowing them to ramp up their own chemical responses to ward off insect attack.
Whether the 'intention' from the initial attacked plants was to *warn* the other unaffected plants, or whether the secondary plant is getting *warned* through chemically *eavesdropping* on the released chemicals from the initial plants, it would seem to qualify as a form of rudimentary communication. The terms, to me, just imply a process. I don't think they are meant as a declaration of human equivalent consciousness. How are the observations from this research absurd?
(The above quotes came from:)
http://www.wired.com/2013/12/secret-language-of-plants/