Plants Have Memory - Proven By Researchers
- 6 years ago
There's an eye-popping paper by Monica Gagliano, associate professor of biology at the University of Western Australia. She’s got a plant that not only “remembered” what happened to it but stored that memory for almost a month. The plant: Mimosa pudica leaves fold in after they are touched. The Sensitive plant, shame plant (Mimosa pudica), flower and leaf, leaves sensitiv, leaflets folded after touching.
Gardeners call Mimosa pudica “the sensitive plant,” because if you touch it even lightly or drop it or disturb it, within seconds it folds its teeny leaves into what looks like a frightened or defensive curl. It’s fun to watch it get all shy.
OK, so it’s highly sensitive. Knowing this, here’s what Gagliano did: She got a bunch of Mimosa pudicas, put them in pots, then loaded each one onto a special plant-dropping device using a sliding steel rail that worked like this:
Each potted plant was dropped roughly six inches, not once, but 60 times in a row at five-second intervals. The plants would glide into a soft, cushiony foam that prevented bouncing. The drop was sufficiently speedy to alarm the plant and cause its teeny leaves to fold into a defensive curl.
To “Eeek!” or Not to “Eeek!”
Six inches, however, is too short a distance to do harm, so what Gagliano wondered was: If she dropped 56 plants 60 times each, would these plants eventually realize nothing terrible was going to happen? Would any of them stop curling?
Or, to put it another way: Could a plant use memory to change its behavior?
To find out, she kept going with her experiment. And, as she writes in her paper, fairly quickly “observed that some individuals did not close their leaves fully when dropped.” In other words, plants seemed to figure out that falling this way wasn’t going to hurt, so more and more of them stopped protecting themselves—until, as she later told a room full of scientists, “By the end, they were completely open … They couldn’t care less anymore.”
Is this evidence of remembering, or is it something else? Maybe, skeptics suggested, all we’re seeing is a bunch of exhausted plants. Curling is work. It takes energy. After 60 drops, these plants may simply be pooped out—that’s why they don’t trigger their defenses. But Gagliano, anticipating this question, took some of those “tired” plants, put them in a shaker, shook them, and instantly they curled up again. “Oh, this is something new,” she imagined them saying, something that hasn’t happened before. That sense of a “before,” she said, is the best explanation for the plants’ change in behavior. They didn’t curl up again because “before” they’d learned there was no need. And they remembered.
Music: From Scales to Feathers by Dhruva Aliman
https://dhruvaaliman.bandcamp.com/album/the-wolf-and-the-river
http://www.dhruvaaliman.com/
Gardeners call Mimosa pudica “the sensitive plant,” because if you touch it even lightly or drop it or disturb it, within seconds it folds its teeny leaves into what looks like a frightened or defensive curl. It’s fun to watch it get all shy.
OK, so it’s highly sensitive. Knowing this, here’s what Gagliano did: She got a bunch of Mimosa pudicas, put them in pots, then loaded each one onto a special plant-dropping device using a sliding steel rail that worked like this:
Each potted plant was dropped roughly six inches, not once, but 60 times in a row at five-second intervals. The plants would glide into a soft, cushiony foam that prevented bouncing. The drop was sufficiently speedy to alarm the plant and cause its teeny leaves to fold into a defensive curl.
To “Eeek!” or Not to “Eeek!”
Six inches, however, is too short a distance to do harm, so what Gagliano wondered was: If she dropped 56 plants 60 times each, would these plants eventually realize nothing terrible was going to happen? Would any of them stop curling?
Or, to put it another way: Could a plant use memory to change its behavior?
To find out, she kept going with her experiment. And, as she writes in her paper, fairly quickly “observed that some individuals did not close their leaves fully when dropped.” In other words, plants seemed to figure out that falling this way wasn’t going to hurt, so more and more of them stopped protecting themselves—until, as she later told a room full of scientists, “By the end, they were completely open … They couldn’t care less anymore.”
Is this evidence of remembering, or is it something else? Maybe, skeptics suggested, all we’re seeing is a bunch of exhausted plants. Curling is work. It takes energy. After 60 drops, these plants may simply be pooped out—that’s why they don’t trigger their defenses. But Gagliano, anticipating this question, took some of those “tired” plants, put them in a shaker, shook them, and instantly they curled up again. “Oh, this is something new,” she imagined them saying, something that hasn’t happened before. That sense of a “before,” she said, is the best explanation for the plants’ change in behavior. They didn’t curl up again because “before” they’d learned there was no need. And they remembered.
Music: From Scales to Feathers by Dhruva Aliman
https://dhruvaaliman.bandcamp.com/album/the-wolf-and-the-river
http://www.dhruvaaliman.com/