Plants Really Do 'Scream'. We've Simply Never Heard Them Until Now

By contrast, stressed plants are much noisier, emitting an average up to around 40 clicks per hour depending on the species. And plants deprived of water have a noticeable sound profile. They start clicking more before they show visible signs of dehydrating, escalating as the plant grows more parched, before subsiding as the plant withers away.
someone smarter than me should get to inventing a device that listens to plant clicks and tells you when it needs water
- That's actually mentioned as one possible use case further down the article!
- Might be a good use-case to have your home irrigation system be triggered by plant clicks instead of a schedule.
  
  It could be. Although we don't know how much those sounds indicate distress, and perhaps watering should happen much sooner.
  Imagine if aliens abduct you and give you food only when your stomach makes the kind of noise it makes after three days without eating anything, because "that's all they can detect."
- They have that now:
  https://www.fastcompany.com/90983510/this-new-wave-of-startups-is-using-ai-to-decode-plants-secret-language
- That idea is mentioned in the article, yes.
  Edit: apologies. The OP has already pointed this out.

Vegans: .. uh.. now what?
- Vegans consume fewer plants than anyone else. It takes a LOT of plants to raise a cow, pig, or chicken. From an economic point of view, meat is a way of refining mountains of cheap, plentiful, safe plant products into a scarce, harmful and addictive luxury product. This comes up a lot, you'd be amazed how many plants rights activists your average vegan runs into.
  
  …addictive?
  
  the same plants that are being fed to animals are the plants that we eat too. animals are mostly said crop seconds or parts of plants the people can't or won't eat.
  
  Wouldn't you need to decimate the population of cows, pigs, and chickens in order to reduce their environmental impact? This argument always invokes an image of Thanos wiping out half the universe in order to 'save' it, but the people making this argument never seem to be receptive to acknowledging this point and just hand wave this step away.
  
  Vegans: we'll have only a little vegetable cruelty, as a treat.
  Whatever keeps the high horse fed.
  
  I challenge you to make an appetizing meal out of the plants (and specific cultivars!) used as animal feed.
  
  Unless you count grass and non-human consumables and non-potable water...sure...until then that's bullshit.
- If you think pigs, chickens and cows have the same level of awareness and perception as broccoli, tomatoes or potatoes than you're the potato.
  Humans have to eat and with the exception of a few minerals like salt, everything edible to humans is alive on some level. Vegansisn is making an ethical choice about reducing what causes the most pain fear and suffering in another. If I were to develop cancer, a tape worm or a virus should I also allow those living things to thrive as well or does "Uh, now what?" also apply to antibiotics?
  
  If you think pigs, chickens and cows have the same level of awareness and perception as broccoli, tomatoes or potatoes than you're the potato.
  Eat people because they're potatoes, got it!
  Or wait, it's "than"? Hmm...no, I can't think of how to turn it into a joke with a punchline of "than" being there instead of "then", lol
  
  How about I just get to eat meat because I consider it far more humane to be more efficient about proteins? And eggs and cheeses are more efficient with all sorts of aminos.
  As much as I respect vegans I also don't agree with their approach. I am of the opinion (as is most biologists) that we are omnivores.
- I hope they like stones. Hmmm, those crunchy minerals!
  
  I hope they like stones. Hmmm, those crunchy minerals!
  
  Goron cuisine
  
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pica_(disorder)
  
  Thought the last mineraterian starved to death last Thursday?
- Eat fruits, the plants give those to you specifically to eat.
  
  In the same way that cultists give human sacrifices to Cthulhu specifically to eat.
  I'm pretty sure the fruits are screaming too.
- Haha as always, you do what you can
  
  Won't someone think of the plants feelings?!?
- What? The fact that plants physically react to being cut has absolutely no bearing on whether they have conscious experience.
  
  Well, not in any way that we can relate to anyway. But that was the same with animals much earlier.
- Time to start eating bacteria now, I guess.
  
  Maybe hundreds of years from now we can synthesize nutrients without involving any living cells. At that point, it could be seen as unethical to enslave, murder and eat billions of microbial cells. For the time being, our life still depends on other living things, so better get comfortable with having mixed feelings about survival.
  
  Bacteria already release stress chemicals when their food is lacking, so...
  
  Isn’t that basically what nutritional yeast is?
- They should eat each other. It's the only ethical choice.
  
  Promoting plants 69ing is so 2024.
  
  Actually the ethical choice would be to eat people who defend carnivory since they’re evil anyway and their lives don’t matter.
- This is exactly the response the author was hoping for.
  
  ~~No, it doesn't.~~
  No, it isn't.

Well, sort of. Not in the same way you or I might scream. Rather, they emit popping or clicking noises in ultrasonic frequencies.
Another "science" community with clickbaity bullshit.
- Eh... What? It's an interesting article. The screaming is in quotation marks. So as far as I'm concerned, the title is fine.

Mowing my lawn must be a fucking nightmare for everything involved. ☹️
- !fucklawns@lemmy.world
- Imagine if instead of a podcast or audiobook or symphonic power metal you had to listen to the screams of your lawn as you mowed its life short
  
  It gets worse -- that doesn't kill the grass. It just mutilates it.
  
  Grass Metal!
  
  That's what the fresh cut grass smell is.
- You know why freshly mown grass smells so nice?
  The smell is the grass's defense against grazing animals, as it attracts predators.
  It smells nice cause it tells your predator brain there are prey animals you can eat nearby.
  So the grass is literally snitching on the animals that are eating it, announcing their presence to their predators.
  Evolution is fascinating that way.
- Wait till you hear about grazing.

Hasn't this study been done before? Feel like I've heard of grass "distress signals" from years back
- Yes, remember that one as well, but this is a literal sound, not only a "plants communicate stress in some way" (if I remember the previous research correctly).
  
  This sound right to me

Nah, the pops and clicks are just plant language for, "I give my consent to be your food. Namaste."

Remember that Mythbusters (Episode 61 Deadly Straw) that re-created Cleve Backster's primary perception experiments to show plants can sense malicious intent and totally re-created his results? I had to re-watch it to make sure I was remembering correctly. They totally just alter the experiment until they break it, then sweep it under the rug and call it busted. Totally.
- So it's been years since I've seen it, but I do remember that episode. I went through the wiki a bit and read up on some of Backster's experiments and how they were received by the scientific community... not great. It is a very intriguing subject, but I think it gets anthropomorphized pretty bad. Even the title here, "plants do scream" almost implies consciousness. I do think there are mechanisms that plants may have evolved that we don't fully understand. Like holding onto water or nutrients if there are more plant clicks (screams) happening nearby. But we have to be scientific about this. In the article, they talk about possible sources of the clicks possibly being air bubbles escaping the plant. Jumping to some of the conclusions that were explored in the past like "plants have ESP" are tall claims. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. Claims like that were never reproducible, so we shouldn't believe them. I think plants are amazing, and we should keep studying stuff like this, but best to stay realistic and phrase these findings appropriately. Just my two cents.

I hear the screams of the vegetables (scream, scream, scream)
Watching their skins being peeled (having their insides revealed)
Grated and steamed with no mercy (burning off calories)
How do you think that feels? (bet it hurts really bad)
Carrot juice constitutes murder (V8's genocide)
Greenhouses prisons for slaves (let my vegetables grow)
We have to stop all this gardening (it's dirty as hell)
Let's call a spade a spade (a spade is a spade is a spade is a spade is a...)
- Omg I had completely forgotten about this!
- Salads are only for murders! Cole slaw's a fascist regime!

My phone also screams (signals) when someone calls, must mean my phone feels pain I guess.

I remember this mythbusters episode. They basically detected that plants “might “ scream or signal to other plants. They got some weird outliers too.
- You misremember it a bit. They saw "activity" when the thing was connected to the plant. Then they moved the plant into a steel container and the readings stopped. They hypothesized that they detected something like vibrations from a busy street etc, not a plant "screaming".
  
  It’s been years since I’ve seen it, so yeah that’s probably right

!digitalbioacoustics@lemmy.world

If this is interesting to you, you may also be interested to check out the book The Light Eaters by Zoe Schlanger
- Is it about people eating light?
  
  Talk about fast food

For me the question is if plants can actually hear these distress sounds, otherwise it’s not really for communication.
- They probably do. But even if not, it can be used for communication with insects and other animals.