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A woody vine, Boquila trifoliolata, has been discovered in Chile that has the amazing ability to change the shape of its leaves depending on what tree it is climbing. Further, the same single vine can drape different species of tree, and it will match the shape and size of its leaves to those of each host, but only along that portion of its length.
Other vines are known to mimic one species of host, as a defense against herbivores, but this vine can mimic many, along its length. Biologists say "It is unclear how B. trifoliolata vines discern the identity of individual trees and shape-shift accordingly." Speculation is that chemicals or microbes might trigger gene-activating signals that trigger leaf differentiation. But left unsaid is how the vine would "learn" how to match the shape of its new host's leaf, how it would know it had succeeded, where it would acquire the genes to do so, and how many different trees it can mimic.
Wouldn't you need eyes to do that?
(Score: 1) by Immerman on Tuesday April 29 2014, @03:38PM
Actually plants are known to signal each other via aromatic compounds - for example when a beetle infestation begins to strike a forest the infected trees begin to emit new compounds which stimulate other trees far downwind to begin producing chemical defenses long before the infection reaches them.
I can't say I've ever heard any explanation of how exactly they *detect* said compounds though.
There's also the possibility that plants may be far more aware of their environment than we normally give them credit for. I'm uncertain as to whether they have been independently verified, but there have been experiments where the conductivity of plants has been monitored in various scenarios and found unexpected results. Supposedly you can put two plants side-by-side and have a volunteer shred one of them, and the other will react to that specific person's presence for some time afterward. Others include plants reacting to someone thinking about burning them, or even reacting when their primary caretaker takes off and lands in a plane halfway across the country. A little woo-woo to be sure, but I'm not prepared to dismiss the claims without counter-evidence.
On a more peer-reviewed level - are you aware that it's been recently discovered that plants appear to have brains? It's true - thousands of them actually. In each root end, immediately behind the boring tip, is a cluster of cells that demonstrate standing-wave electrical activity similar to that found in an animal-based brain, along with clusters of chemoreceptors to make a bloodhound's nose look crude. And seen in time-lapse each of those root tips behaves not unlike a worm, and is capable of navigating around obstacles. It's not much of a brain, comparable in size to a worm or insect, but there's one at the tip of every single one of the thousands of roots, potentially giving a single plant the intellectual capacity of a large ant nest. If those micro-brains collaborate it's possible that plants could actually possess a rudimentary distributed intelligence. Future experiments are planned to attach root-tip controlled wheels to a plant so that it can propel itself, and presumably see if it's capable of learning to propel itself in a coherent manner.
Anecdotal sample size of one, but many of my houseplants seem to learn how to inform me they need to be watered. At least those that survive. After a few months they'll start drooping horribly even while the soil is still slightly moist, and then perk up and look perfectly healthy before the water has even finished soaking into their soil. Sure, that *could* be a symptom of vascular damage from repeated neglect, but it also strongly resembles a crude form of communication.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 29 2014, @05:46PM
> Supposedly you can put two plants side-by-side and have a volunteer shred one of them, and the other will react to that specific person's presence for some time afterward. Others include plants reacting to someone thinking about burning them, or even reacting when their primary caretaker takes off and lands in a plane halfway across the country.
These claims are from the _A Wrinkle in Time_ book series. Which is fiction where the universe's weird voodoo physics based on conscious subatomic particles explains these observations. Please check your sourcing more carefully next time.
(Score: 1) by Immerman on Thursday May 01 2014, @05:15AM
Nope, though I do remember the scene with the little plants at home and at the library, I don't believe there was any plant-shredding going on in the Wrinkle books. My source was something older I think, and a fair bit more practical... "Paranormal Research Beyond the Iron Curtain" or something like that - chock full of oddities and the procedures by which you could duplicate them. I don't believe I ever attempted the plant-related ones, lacking a lie detector to detect the reaction, but I was able to recreate enough of the others to leave me credulous.