00:04animals need air to breathe and there's really nothing we can do to hide that but
00:08plants need air to just the parts that we exhale and a new study investigating
00:12the process by which plants taken co2 and exhale oxygen is providing a close
00:16up view of that process and it's a bit freaky just how similar their breathing
00:20looks to ours this video was captured as part of that study showing what
00:24basically looks like a tiny mouth breathing in and out this mouth is
00:27actually a stomata and it opens and closes in response to the levels of
00:30carbon dioxide in the air going up and down but this is on a microscopic scale
00:34for reference there are thousands of these little mouths on every leaf when
00:38the stomata open they take in the plants needed co2 but it also exposes itself to
00:43the air drying out the plant meaning they need to open up to breathe and close
00:47once again to balance the intake of air and the loss of moisture experts say they
00:50hope that better understanding this process on a molecular level will help
00:53them develop new ways of feeding plants in a changing climate and that's
00:57important as over the last 60 years alone agriculture has lagged behind some
01:0121 percent of what would have been possible if climate change wasn't happening
