The idea of a plant making noises may evoke a vision of the mandrakes from Harry Potter.
But a new study suggests that plants really do produce distress calls when they do not get enough water.
They also appear to produce alarm sounds after being cut, with these noises found to come from tomato and tobacco plants, as well as corn and the grapevines used to make Cabernet Sauvignon.
Ultrasonic vibrations have been recorded from plants previously, using sensors directly touching them.
Now the new study provides the first evidence that plants emit airborne sounds, which researchers estimate could be heard by animals with sharp hearing like mice and moths from up to 16 feet (five metres) away.
For humans, who do not hear in the high-frequency ‘ultrasonic’ range, researchers have helpfully lowered the frequency so we can experience the plant noises – which are delivered rather loudly at the same volume as normal human conversation.
Normally plants produce a noise rather like popcorn popping – thought to be caused by air bubbles bursting in their stem – less than once an hour.
But tomato plants which had not been watered for up to five days produced this popping sound much more frantically – more than once every two minutes on average.
When they were cut, the tomato plants made an alarm sound around every two and a half minutes.
Professor Lilach Hadany, an evolutionary biologist at Tel Aviv University and senior author of the study looking at hundreds of plants, said: ‘Our findings suggest that the world around us is full of plant sounds, and that these sounds contain information – for example about water scarcity or injury.
‘We assume that in nature the sounds emitted by plants are detected by creatures nearby, such as bats, rodents, various insects, and possibly also other plants – that can hear the high frequencies and derive relevant information
Source (Daily Mail )
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