#plant intelligence

New in the Catalog!

Gathering Moss: A Natural & Cultural History of Mosses by Robin Wall Kimmerer

Any life existing on another planet would be further removed from us than bacteria. The chances of intelligent alien life existing at the same time as us, after the number of completely chance happenings that have occurred on our planet to make the sheer diversity of life (and thus eventual intelligence) even possible, is quite literally astronomical. The advent of life hasn’t even occurred more than once on our planet that we know of. Every single living thing here that we are aware of is related. But suggest our distant relatives, the plant kingdom, may have more in common with the animal kingdom than we give them credit for and a lot of people will scoff or simply say “they don’t have brains” and completely shut themselves off from even the possibility.

But a number of sea animals don’t have brains either, some of them mobile, including starfish, sea urchins, clams, oysters, sea cucumbers, lancelets, and jellyfish. At least not as we understand brains, as a gelatinous mass in our heads with electrical signals.

Plant root systems do have electrical signals though. There’s evidence that at least some of them communicate with one another in the sense of warning. There’s evidence many of them are less competitive with members of their own species (crown shyness in trees for example). Some plants seem to show a preference for their own siblings, avoiding root competition even if planted closely together. And some trees seem to directly feed their own offspring and will pass more nutrients to them than to others of their species. Some trees seem to go so far as to intentionally starve their young of sunlight, making them dependent on the parent, to keep them from growing too quickly. Slow growth when young means a dense core that’s hard to snap and hard to bore into. Some trees even seem to help heal one another through infection and injury with this continuous passing of nutrients through their roots

Some plants also exhibit learning behaviours. For example, the impatient hop plant that keeps trying to make shoots in early spring, only for them to die with each frost until late May, will make their shoots later, smaller, and tougher the following spring. A tree that tries to take too much water in draught and causes itself to crack won’t do so again. Ever.

They also aren’t as immobile as we suppose. Vines should make that obvious, but I don’t just mean above ground. I’ve had at least three different species come up in different areas from where I planted them due to “creeping rhizomes”. These snake their way through the soil till they find an area they like better and will allow the part in the area they didn’t like to die back. The activity of these rhizomes, unlike the top part of the plant, doesn’t stop in the winter. In addition to finding places they like better, the more aggressive ones will seek to spread. What they can’t out compete in the summer, they can certainly try to do in the winter, so that when the warm months come again they can push up their shoots anywhere and everywhere (constant battle with my sunflowers on that: I swear they’ve gone under the sidewalk as there are some suspicious shoots on the other side that I don’t think are my asters).

It is possible then, if you reclaim your capacity to feel, to make intelligent contact with the intelligence of any eco-range in which you are embedded to establish rapport and deep friendship and to learn from that relationship, to, in fact, learn to ‘think like a mountain’ from the mountain itself.”

A guide to plant sentience

IDK if you know this, but plants and animals are not the same thing! There are several major differences.

Plants cannot move. They are stuck in the ground. It's the ultimate demonstration of adaption, and it's given them a different evolutionary system. Instead of having a central area for organs and locomotive muscles in the extremities, plants spread their functions across all regions. Plants breathe, gather nutrients, keep their "blood pressure" up, see, feel, react, with every single cell in their body. This is so that if you damage a plant — you cut down a chunk, or you eat some, or some of it gets burned in a forest fire — it keeps living. Plants will even create large networks of aboveground growths while staying connected beneath the soil in order to prolong its life; Aspen forests, for example, are not a community of different organisms. They are limbs of the same root system.

Plants can see. (Probably.) Ocelli are structures of lens-like cells and photosensitive cells in plant leaves and stems. Some plants (like boquila vine) grow in different manners to mimic the host plant they're growing in.

These are all the same species of plant.

They have the ability to smell. They use their sense of smell to differentiate between real and fake plants and to identify where plants are when they can't see them. Vines are capable of growing towards tomato plants, even when both are kept in containment and separated from each other. They even use it to signal to other plants that things are going on, like one plant getting a bug infestation in an area leading to all plants responding to a bug infestation. That communicative network of aromatics have led some researchers to link cameras to the plants and connect their communication style to the internet — re: drought incoming.

We also know that plants have a type of memory. The mimosa, or shameplant, curls its leaves inward when touched (it's one of few plants that moves at a speed humans can observe unaided). However, if the mimosa is exposed to repeated stimuli that doesn't cause it harm, it will stop closing. It can hold on to whether or not a sensation is harmful or safe for 40 days.

So what would a fully sentient plant look like? Basically, like it does now. The only way to make a plant clearly sentient is to give it a better means of communication. Plants do communicate with high frequency electromagnetic waves — higher pitches when in distress, lower when contented. Were a plant to understand how or an animalistic species to develop evolutionarily, those frequencies could interact with electrical impulses to create thoughts — plants direct streaming their thoughts into a human-or-similar's head.

“Plant development is clearly modular, highly polarized through tip growth, and often exhibits complex branching patterns to enable proper resource exploitation that continues throughout the life cycle.

writing about plant intelligence today 🌿✨🌦

writing an opinion piece about a long scientific debate was such challenging work, but I loved it!