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Have you ever thought about the question: how smart are plants?

Sunflowers can sense light, and mimosa can sense the stimulation of touch. But this plant may refresh your cognition, because it can listen to music and dance with it! When the music plays, we can see that its slender leaves begin to circle regularly and have a sense of rhythm. Even when the pitch gets higher, the dance of the plant changes.

Grass who is good at dancing. | Tuyuan Network, the "king of dance" in the plant world, is called Codariocalyx motorius. It is distributed in Yunnan, Fujian and other places in China and is famous for its ability to dance. It not only has many ancient legends, but also detailed recorded by Darwin in the book "the Power of Plant Movement".

Since it is the "king of dance", there are still requirements for the stage. According to records, when the temperature reaches more than 22 degrees Celsius, and then in the case of plenty of light, the plant will hear the sound and move: the leaves swing left and right, rotating each other. It will move more rhythmically under the music.

Dancing leaves with a sense of rhythm. | Giphy but today, it is still a mystery why it can dance. You know, plants need a lot of energy to make leaves move quickly. In order to be able to dance, each leaf of the dance grass is equipped with a "hinge", which overcomes the weight of the blade itself and moves it.

Why do plants learn to dance if they are not based on some special purpose of survival? To this end, botanists put forward several guesses to explain the behavior of dancing grass.

Why on earth are you dancing? | Giphy some people say that this may be a defense mechanism. A plant can dance and may be a villain in nature, and insects should not dare to mess with it when they see it. Others say the plant dances like a butterfly, preventing the butterfly from laying eggs on its leaves.

In addition, dancing grass can only dance in the light. So some people say that it may be to absorb as much energy from the sun as possible. Maybe the swing of the dance grass is also stimulated by the light. Because at night, all the leaves of the dance grass will hang down, but they will rise again during the day.

The leaves of dancing grass during the day are compared with those at night. | Wiki has light-sensitive spongy tissue at the root of the small leaves where dancing grass can dance. When the sun shines and the temperature rises, the water in the plant evaporates quickly, and the sponge expands and makes the leaves dance. At night, the sponge shrinks and the leaves hang down. The study found that when the temperature rises to about 30 degrees Celsius, the dancing grass will dance more and dance more actively.

The most surprising thing about dancing grass is its ability to "listen to music". However, this does not mean that plants really have "ears" to listen to sound. Botanists believe that these plants actually receive sound vibrations through their leaves. Other studies seem to show that dancing grass can also be "learned". After hearing the music repeated many times, Dancao seems to improve its dance and dance better and better.

Going back to the question at the beginning, are plants smart? It's hard to give an answer. Like dancing grass, it has strange behavior and looks like it has a smart brain. But this is not the case.

Botanist Stefano Mancuso says plants don't have brains, but they are intelligent. They may not be "smart", but they have a different way of perceiving the world. Daniel Chamovitz, a biologist who studies plant senses, notes that plants can see without eyes, smell without nose, and feel sound without ears.

Mimosa can sense mechanical stimuli. | Wiki not only dance grass can sense sound, but also studies have found that corn root tends to grow to a sound source with a frequency of about 200 Hz. Some plants can sense the sound of water in underground pipes and move toward it.

But like dodder (Cuscuta pentagona Engelm.) They have a special preference for the taste of tomatoes, and they can sense the smell of tomatoes. This means that they may have some complex "olfactory" sensors in their bodies.

The mimosa as we know it folds the leaves when touched. The flytrap closes its leaves quickly when it catches insects. This mechanical stimulation causes the plant to produce an action potential, which is finally converted into elastic potential energy and closes its "small door" to prey on insects.

The flytrap catches insects very fast! | Giphy the root tips of many plants are important sensory organs. They can feel light, water, air, nutrition and water in the environment. How on earth do these plants feel? And how do you control the changes in the body? There are still secrets in these problems, which are waiting for us to uncover.

Plants are as magical as the animal world. | Giphy reference materials:

[1] Lev-Yadun S. The enigmatic fast leaflet rotation inDesmodium motorium. Butterfly mimicry for defense? Plant Signal Behav 2013Bing 8 is ripe e24473.

[2] Gagliano M. Green symphonies: a call for studies on acoustic communication in plants. Behav Ecol 2013 24 position 789-96.

[3] https://www.arkopharma.com/en-SG/sensory-nature-plants

[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rapid_plant_movement

[5] Poppinga, Simon, et al. "Fastest predators in the plant kingdom: functional morphology and biomechanics of suction traps found in the largest genus of carnivorous plants." AoB Plants 8 (2016)

This article comes from the official Wechat account: bring Science Home (ID:steamforkids), author: Skin, revision: a Xian

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