Researchers Prove Plants Produce Ultrasonic Squeals When Stressed

That's wild! Kind of puts a new twist on how to look at plants. There's so much we don't know but are slowly learning.

A group of researchers has recently demonstrated that plants emit an ultrasonic sound when stressed. Although human ears can’t pick up the noise, the scientists have proven that essentially when stressed, plants scream.

When stressed, plants are able to scream, and the noise can be picked up by animals and other plants.
A group of researchers has recently demonstrated that plants emit an ultrasonic sound when stressed. Although human ears can’t pick up the noise, the scientists have proven that essentially when stressed, plants scream.

In fact, we’ve not known just how complex plants are until relatively recently. For example, not long ago we discovered that plants use the ground to communicate with each other, and we also discovered recently that they respond to “attacks” by emitting signals that experts found to closely resemble animal responses to pain.

Now, a new study has proven that plants, when under stress, produce an ultrasonic screaming noise.

Read more....
Researchers Prove Plants Produce Ultrasonic Squeals When Stressed — Curiosmos

I hate it when people reporting on science and headline writers say scientists have 'proven' something...

beenherebeforeagain said:

I hate it when people reporting on science and headline writers say scientists have 'proven' something...

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And not peer reviewed, either...

beenherebeforeagain said:

I hate it when people reporting on science and headline writers say scientists have 'proven' something...

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Don't focus on the reporter but what is being reported. Try the study instead

Plants emit informative airborne sounds under stress

An ultrasonic "squeal" isn't necessarily a scream. Lots of things produce sound under lots of different conditions. What is the function and mechanism of this sound? How do other plants pick it up? None of this has been made clear.

Imputing consciousness or intention from this is unsupported anthropomorphizing.

Evangelicalhumanist said:

And not peer reviewed, either...

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Of course not. It's a new study. It does say it isn't peer reviewed yet.

Valjean said:

An ultrasonic "squeal" isn't necessarily a scream. Lots of things produce sound under lots of different conditions. What is the function and mechanism of this sound? How do other plants pick it up? None of this has been made clear.

Imputing consciousness or intention from this is unsupported anthropomorphizing.

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Lol. It's just a new study that I found interesting. I didn't take from it that it's trying to imply consciousness. However if it happens when needing water or injured, that would imply intention.

We Never Know said:

Don't focus on the reporter but what is being reported. Try the study instead

Plants emit informative airborne sounds under stress

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My comment was solely about the unnecessary hyperbole of the headline, which reinforces and incorrect idea about science and scientists.

Just under the title at the link you provided, is the caveat: "This article is a preprint and has not been certified by peer review"

Even allow a little journalistic license, the headline is incorrect.

It sounds like an interesting application of machine learning to a condition that has been previously identified, that is, that at least some plants make noises when stressed. But peer review has not been completed. When it has been, then the article might be something more than just a preliminary report by the authors of their research effort--which is all it is right now.

We Never Know said:

Lol. It's just a new study that I found interesting. I didn't take from it that it's trying to imply consciousness. However if it happens when needing water or injured, that would imply intention.

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Function, yes, but intention implies conscious will. Lots of things happen unconsciously and automatically.

" if trees could scream would we be so cavalier about cutting them down? Probably so if they screamed all the time for no good reason"
-Jack Handy

Seriously though plants are living organisms so it is reasonable to imagine or at least consider the possibility they might feel pain or stress even if the science of our day cannot prove it. Either way it is fascinating to think about and also reminds me of the Native American idea that all on earth is alive and that westerners believe everything is dead.

Valjean said:

An ultrasonic "squeal" isn't necessarily a scream. Lots of things produce sound under lots of different conditions. What is the function and mechanism of this sound? How do other plants pick it up? None of this has been made clear.

Imputing consciousness or intention from this is unsupported anthropomorphizing.

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Well corn has ears, so obviously they have an advantage among plants.

We Never Know said:

That's wild! Kind of puts a new twist on how to look at plants. There's so much we don't know but are slowly learning.

A group of researchers has recently demonstrated that plants emit an ultrasonic sound when stressed. Although human ears can’t pick up the noise, the scientists have proven that essentially when stressed, plants scream.

When stressed, plants are able to scream, and the noise can be picked up by animals and other plants.
A group of researchers has recently demonstrated that plants emit an ultrasonic sound when stressed. Although human ears can’t pick up the noise, the scientists have proven that essentially when stressed, plants scream.

In fact, we’ve not known just how complex plants are until relatively recently. For example, not long ago we discovered that plants use the ground to communicate with each other, and we also discovered recently that they respond to “attacks” by emitting signals that experts found to closely resemble animal responses to pain.

Now, a new study has proven that plants, when under stress, produce an ultrasonic screaming noise.

Read more....
Researchers Prove Plants Produce Ultrasonic Squeals When Stressed — Curiosmos

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From 2010:

Valjean said:

What is the function and mechanism of this sound?

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One hypothesis is that the capillary tubes start to swing under certain conditions like draught, just like a ringing water tube. But there is no study on the mechanism yet, only on the effect.

We Never Know said:

Of course not. It's a new study. It does say it isn't peer reviewed yet.

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The earliest experiments claiming to show that plants feel pain was in 1966. But the results were not able to replicated.

Cleve Backster - Wikipedia

We Never Know said:

That's wild! Kind of puts a new twist on how to look at plants. There's so much we don't know but are slowly learning.

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There is indeed much we do not know and much we are learning. This "research" (the original paper is here) is mostly a barrier to knowledge and to further studies. Hopefully, it will have to be significantly improved before it is published if it is at all (currently, the article is in preprint ostensibly awaiting peer-review).
Plants are living systems, and as such even their individual cells are capable of "sensing" their environment and adapting/responding accordingly. Sound, we must recall, is actually a perception of a particular kind of vibration. It has been known for years that plants are able to alter their biochemical and molecular structures in response to various kinds of pressures including those that can be identified as sound waves. It is not clear that they have or could have any ability to distinguish these vibrations from more general mechanical vibrations (in laypersons terms, they can't distinguish between touch and sound). Plants lack any nervous system, so their biochemical adaptivity to environment is comparatively limited and more akin to that of e.g., bacteria than to insects or more complex animal life.
What the researchers did was create an artificial environment that was supposed to cause plant "stress" by either "drought" or by cutting in a specialized box. They then hooked up some highly sensitive microphones, read in a bunch of noise, and used a variety of mostly inappropriate statistical & signal processing methods to classify what they called sound emission from background noise. They then "trained" some handicapped versions of otherwise quite powerful tools from machine learning/data analysis (e.g., SVMs) in order to force a binary classification to identify "sound emission" from one kind of "stressed" plant vs. another over and against background noise.
This would all still be just mostly bad research compounded with terrible choices of terminology were it not for the fact that they felt the need to make wild leaps of fantastical inference about what it was they actually did. All living systems are highly "chaotic" (they are far from thermodynamic equilibrium, they are adaptive, they are networks of complex dynamical subsystems, etc.) and in any kind of environment there are a variety of byproducts of their metabolic and other biochemical processes that produce a range of effects on their environment. Some of these are more or less random in the sense that they are no more a response of the plant than e.g., the sound a branch might make when creaking from shaking in the wind. Others are more directly related to functional processes.
The problem here is that the researchers don't have any idea what it is the plants might be doing to cause what they call "sound" they claim to be emitted by the plants as a result of mechanical strain (cutting) our biochemical strain (artificial drought). They suggest it might be cavitation or the explosion of air bubbles, but regard the question of how the "sound" is actually produced as irrelevant to whether or not it conveys information. Of course, one could perform a similar experiment and determine that trees communicate by using the wind to produce creaking languages and provide probably more robust statistical evidence than the researchers did.

We Never Know said:

Of course not. It's a new study. It does say it isn't peer reviewed yet.

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That hasn't stopped the lead author from making claims based on the preprint in the peer-reviewed literature (see attached). While the attached paper is more cautious in many of its claims (as it is primarily a review of existing literature that conveniently ignores a great deal of criticism in the rather cherry-picked selection of studies used to make claims about our state of knowledge here), nonetheless the study in question is used in the attach by the author identically to how peer-reviewed studies are. It could be that the preprint was submitted in order to make use of it in this manner (wouldn't be the first time). The fact remains that the study is fundamentally flawed for both technical mathematical reasons and experimental design issues as well as problematic inferences. I've seen more robust signal detection and classification methods used in paranormal pseudoscience and ghost hunting.

There is some interesting research about trees communicating with each other when stressed and it appears to have support in the scientific community. I first heard of this in the early 80s. At the time this idea did not have consensus support. Here are some articles that discuss this.

Plant Calls in Wasps to Kick Some Butterfly Butt | Live Science
Do Trees Talk to Each Other? | Science | Smithsonian Magazine