From attacking rivals to sowing their own seeds – 20 bonkers ways plants will blow your mind
MORE than 27 million of us Brits enjoy gardening – and with studies showing it improves your mental health and physical fitness there’s more reason than ever to get your hands dirty.
But did you know the plants at your fingertips are secretly hiding a series of superpowers?
Not only have they evolved into half a million species that thrive in every ecosystem on the planet, they’ve engineered some of the most impressive adaptations in nature to ensure they reign supreme.
And all this baring in mind that they cannot actually move.
New book The Light Eaters, by Zoe Schlanger, takes you into a world where plants can count, communicate and have a concept of time.
Here’s twenty bonkers ways plants will blow your mind.
1. When Cress finds itself beside it’s siblings, it rearranges their leaves within two days to avoid shading them.
2. Pea shoot roots appeared to be able to hear water flowing through sealed pipes and grow toward them.
3. Lima beans and tobacco can react to an attack of munching insects by summoning those insects’ specific predators to come pick them off.
4. There’s a particular tomato that secretes a chemical that causes hungry caterpillars to turn away from devouring their leaves to eat each other instead.
5. Japanese Knotweed is one the most invasive plants on the planet – just a fingernail-sized root fragment left behind can regenerate the entire plant.
6. Peruvian plant Biquila Trifoliata can spontaneously morph into the shape of any plant it grows beside.
7. Carnivorous plants were recently discovered to have evolved to hunt in packs – collaborating on catching insects allows them to lure larger prey.
8. Sunflowers are known allelopathics, meaning that they will secrete chemicals into the soil when resources are low to stop the germination of seedlings of other plants.
9. Brazilian plant Spigelia genufluxa’ fruit bends down and plants its own seed into the ground – burying it in the soft moss it grows in.
10. Plants might grow thorns and spikes and stinging hairs, developed with remarkable precision, to pierce the flesh or exoskeleton of whatever mammal or bug might be its main threat.
11. Some plants can secrete sticky sugar to entice and then immobilize their antagonists, whose hungry mouths get stuck shut.
12. A leaf, sensing that it has been nibbled, can produce a plume of airborne chemicals that tell a plant’s more distant branches to activate their immune systems, manufacturing yet more repellent chemicals to deter incoming aphids and other plant- eating bugs.
13. Several types of plants have been found to identify a caterpillar’s species by sensing the compounds in its saliva, and then synthesize the exact compounds to summon its predator.
Parasitic wasps then obligingly arrive to take care of the caterpillars.
14. Plants are fully aware of our contact with them, and will rearrange their lives to respond to such treatment.
‘Ward off threats’
15. The Beach Evening Primrose increases the sweetness of its nectar within three minutes of being exposed to an audio recording of honeybee flight.
16. Nasa poissonianas have an ability to store and recall information – they remember the time intervals between bumblebee visits, and anticipate the next time their pollinator was likely to arrive.
17. Cornish mallow, a pink- flowered plant, will turn its leaves hours before sunrise to face the horizon in exactly the direction it expects the sun to rise.
18. Bittersweet nightshade, a plant in the same family as tomatoes, potatoes, and tobacco, secretes sugary nectar in order to recruit ants as bodyguards.
The ants, hooked on the sticky syrup the plant oozes for them, dutifully pluck off the larvae of the bittersweet’s mortal enemy, the flea beetle, which are clinging to the plant’s stem.
19. If Yellow monkey flowers are exposed to predators, they will produce babies with a quiver of defensive spikes on their leaves.
20. Wild radishes that have lived through a scourge of destructive caterpillars will make baby radishes with extra-bristly leaves too, plus they’ll be preloaded with defensive chemicals to better ward off threats.
- Extracted from The Light Eaters, published by William Collins at £22 on 9th May
