Common peas were able to perceive the direction in which the water was murmuring.
The sensory system in plants is obviously more complex than is commonly thought. Plants in particular have senses roughly equivalent to our hearing. It is about the ability to capture the vibrations of the environment produced by the water flowing somewhere. These are the results of the work of a team of researchers from the University of Western Australia, which the participants in the process shared on the pages of the journal Oecologia.
“We used common garden peas (Pisum sativum) as a test plant for our work,” says team leader Dr. Monica Gagliano. Plants were planted in containers, each of which had two tubes at the bottom, allowing the root system to grow in two directions.
The "test subjects" were given the opportunity to "listen" to white noise and the murmur of flowing water under each pipe. Scientists have observed their "behavior", or, more correctly, the development of the root system. To their surprise, it turned out that the peas recognize the sounds of flowing water and are pulled towards them with their roots.
As Dr. Galliano emphasizes, if water was already present in the soil (the ground was wet), the plants practically did not react to sound. “We see the complex relationship of the plant to sound when making behavioral decisions,” she emphasizes.
Picture illustrating the actions of utilities when the pipe is clogged with plant roots
“This indicates that the braiding of sewer pipes with roots can be explained by the 'hearing' of plants. In general, their perception of the world around them is much broader and more complex than we thought before,”sums up Dr. Galliano.
The fact that plants, when forming the root system, choose directions with the most comfortable moisture for them, was known earlier. How this choice is made in wet soil is more or less clear. The mechanism for making decisions with a lack of input information, if it was too dry around remained a mystery. The new work of Australian biologists is called upon, if not to solve this problem, then at least to outline the way to its solution.
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