Plants have many “magical abilities” that people don’t know about. Jack C Schultz, a professor at the Department of Plant Sciences in the United States, believes that plants are “just very slow-moving animals” that compete for territory, find food, escape predators, and let prey fall into traps. Plants even have the ability to communicate with others and know who is lying.
Plants can detect the sound of insects chewing on leaves
The British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) published an article on February 10, “What are the “magical abilities” of plants that you don’t know about”, which introduced the results of long-term research on plants by multiple experts – plants have vision, smell, touch, hearing, and are capable of perception. of.
Jack Schultz, a professor of plant sciences at the University of Missouri in Columbia, has spent forty years studying the interactions between plants and insects. He said plants move with purpose, which means they must be aware of what’s going on around them. “In order to respond correctly, plants also need to adjust complex sensor organs according to different conditions.”
According to the article, Schultz’s colleagues at the University of Missouri, Heidi Appel and Rex Cocroft, are studying plant hearing.
Beethoven’s symphonies have little effect on plants, Appel said, but a hungry caterpillar approaching a plant is another matter.
In their experiments, Appel and Cockcroft found that the sound produced by the gnawing caterpillars caused the plant leaves to secrete large amounts of chemical defense agents to repel the bugs. “Our study shows that plants respond to ecologically relevant ‘sounds’ in ecologically relevant ways,” Cockcroft said. However, the plant has no response at all to natural sounds (such as wind, etc.).
Plants have no ears, so why can they distinguish sounds? Appel and Cockcroft believe that plants can convert the tiny deformations produced when sound waves sweep over objects into electrical or chemical signals.
Plants can smell ‘food’
The article also introduced that research by Consuelo De Moraes of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich and his collaborators showed that in addition to hearing approaching insects, plants can also smell nearby insects. Volatile signals released by plants in response.
She once demonstrated how a parasitic plant called dodder vine can sniff out a potential host. Back then, sinuous dodder twisted in the air and coiled around its hapless host, extracting its nutrients.
She said there is no difference between these plants and humans. They smell or hear something and act accordingly, just like humans.
Plants have the ability to communicate with others
Baxter is an American polygraph expert. In 1966, he accidentally recorded the advanced human-like emotional activities of plants through a lie detector and subsequently conducted a series of studies. His research caused a sensation all over the world.
On one occasion, Baxter wanted to see how plants would react to threats. He soaked the leaves of a plant into hot coffee. When there was no reaction, he thought: burn the leaves attached to the lie detector. Just when he thought of this, before he could get the match, an upward curve appeared rapidly on the paper. When he came back with the match, he saw another peak in the curve. Maybe the plant saw that he was determined to take action and was frightened. broken.
But when he began to hesitate, the reaction recorded by the polygraph was no longer so strong. When he pretended to burn the leaves, the plant did not respond. The plant was able to distinguish his true and false intentions.
Another experiment by Baxter also proved this extrasensory function of plants: there was a person in the house, and there was a spider. People should limit the activities of spiders, and spiders will hide and hide. Every time a spider encounters an obstacle and decides to break free, the plant picks up the spider’s thoughts.
Plants can be lie detector experts
Polygraph tests usually involve attaching the instrument to a suspect, but this time Baxter attached the lie detector to a plant, and he found that plants can tell whether people are lying. He asked a person’s birth year and reported seven years, one of which was correct. But this person denied all the answers. As a result, when the correct era was denied, a peak appeared on the record paper.
Dr. Aristide Esser, director of the medical research department at Rockland State Hospital in New York, repeated this experiment: A man was asked to give incorrect answers to some questions, and as a result, he grew up young. The big plant did not protect him at all, and reflected all the wrong answers on the recording paper.
A netizen lamented on his blog: “Buddhism believes that all things have spirits. It used to be considered superstitious, but now science has confirmed that plants are sentient.”
