How plants talk to one another..

[Pakanohida]

From the BBC

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-16916474

Enjoy, I did.

I find it interesting that science is only now catching up with what Indigenous tribes world wide have been saying since before Gilgamesh was turned away from the animals.

[Finchj]

Great find!

Leads to many more questions. And you are right, it is interesting that all these finds are being hailed as recent discoveries rather confirmation of ancient knowledge.

[FREE Permaculture]

yeah I found it interesting too.
it does seem that they are communicating, but they are saying that the plants recieving the message
protect themselves, how would a plant protect itself?
I think it's saying to the other plants, hey i'm being cut, we need to make babies.
the other two say, oh shit are you ok? alright then bud, we'lll make babies with you.

[FREE Permaculture]

which then made me think, if a plant send a message to other plants that it's being cut and they need to re populate,
then wouldn't that be beneficial in an orchard environment?
give every 3rd tree a hard time, it'll send the message out, and they produce more fruits?

I'm also thinking about cut n drop type plants, and how they seem to thrive on being cut, if you don't cut comfrey for instance, it starts to get raggedy after a while, but if you cut it sends up fresh and strong regrowth, cut again and it keeps coming, loves it!

[Finchj]

Hmm, they mention that the plants start creating toxins that make them unpalatable to herbivores or something. But I wouldn't doubt that they have the ability to tell each other when they are ready to reproduce. I've read they can already synchronize their bloom times through hormone exchanges.

[Pakanohida]

We are all seeing the trees before the forest, and are also forgetting that the hyphae roots also can be stretched over kilometers and signal back to the original plant as well, this, with its numerous connections to other plants, and trees we are ALL missing the larger picture here.

When humanity learns it, we can then start seeing the forest again.

[Michaelangelica]

Above ground (probably chemical) communication has been known for some time. There is an African Tree (Acacia?) that lets its relatives know it is being grazed on, by say Giraffes, and lets other trees in the area know, who in turn produce a bitter tasting substance to deter herbivores
The quotes article is the first I have seen that talks about below ground communication though

Above gound :_

an Baldwin works in a lab anyone could love: a large blackened burn area high on a steep slope in the Great Basin Desert of southwestern Utah. Here a distant mountain range shimmers blue and lavender, the nearer craggy cliffs of Veyo Ridge hover in red, and the curves of the desert hills are dotted green by Joshua trees and scrub. Baldwin, a biologist and the director of the Molecular Ecology Department at the Max Planck Institute for Chemical Ecology in Jena, Germany, has stationed his equipment here to launch a new study of how plants defend themselves—a question he has pursued for 20 years.


Above: Ian Baldwin and his team set up equipment in the Utah desert to monitor wild tobacco's chemical defenses against enemies like caterpillars (shown below). Baldwin had not expected to detect any effects. "The fact that it worked was an amazing surprise," he says. "I turned from a skeptic to a believer. The nice thing about research is you can prove yourself wrong."

He and his colleagues are using chemical sensors to investigate plant communications: cries for help, invitations, even warnings, each in the form of odor molecules that float past human noses unnoticed. The harder biologists look for these signals, the more they find. They have already discovered that plants can send chemical cues to repel insect enemies, as well as signals that attract allies—other insects that are pleased to eat the insects eating the plant. But that is only the start of a more complex scenario, for Baldwin and others have also found that nearby plants can listen in to this conversation and gear up their own defenses.

Some of the most complex studies came out of these controlled environments. In 1988 Marcel Dicke and his colleagues at Wageningen University in the Netherlands offered evidence that plants under insect attack could enlist help from the enemies of their enemies. Dicke found that when spider mites attack lima bean plants, the plants release a chemical SOS that attracts another mite that preys on the spider mite. Mechanically damaged plants do not produce the cues; most likely, only elicitors in the saliva of the insect can trigger the plant to produce the right molecules. "Today," Dicke says, "the scientific community agrees that plants talking to their bodyguards is likely to be a characteristic of most, if not all, plant species." Even the gingko—a species that has been around for 150 million years—can communicate chemically with insects, he adds.

http://discovermagazine.com/2002/apr/featplants

[Finchj]

Thanks for the post Michaelangelica.

I've been wondering if plants can sense humans through chemical scents we give off. If dogs/cats can smell trouble, then I'm sure plants can too.

Odd statement at the end there though. Why would the gingko be any different, just because it is ancient? Its not like the tree hasn't been evolving since it appeared either.

[Michaelangelica]

Odd statement at the end there though. Why would the gingko be any different, just because it is ancient? Its not like the tree hasn't been evolving since it appeared either.

I don't know, maybe because it hasn't any relatives left to warn ?
It is an interesting tree The only(?) tree with motile sperm ( that swim directly to the egg inside the ovule)

[Finchj]

I guess thats a possibility, but we know that plants communicate across species.

Interesting plant. Has a lot to teach us I'm sure.