“Plants scream when they suffer”: the video with the “crying” of tomatoes and tobacco published by the researchers

Do plants suffer like us humans? Not really, but the concept of suffering would not be foreign to the life forms of the plant world :

This is confirmed by the researchers of Tel-Aviv University, authors of a scientific research published in the well-known specialized magazine Cell and then also in the equally well-known Nature . In the scientific study, Lilach Hadany and his colleagues from the Israeli university surrounded the plants with ultra-sensitive microphones , thus managing to give a “voice” to a tobacco plant and a tomato by recording sounds inaudible to the ears of us human beings. When pruned or not watered for a long time, the two seedlings made sounds which, once speeded up in post-production, resembled «of popcorn pops ,” as Hadany notes. It is not a question of real “screams” but not even of fake news:

According to the research, this phenomenon would be associated with the xylem , the plant tissue composed of a sort of ” tubes ” that carry water and nutrients from the roots to stems and leaves. These may emit a shy sound at the moment of the snap which is therefore audible through the right instruments. Specifically, these are ultrasounds classifiable between 20 and 100 kilohertz that are imperceptible to our ears (except in very rare cases, humans stop at 16 kilohertz) but which could be heard by other animals such as mice , bats and moths :

Through the machine learning technique , scientists have reconstructed the ultrasound emitted by plants with 70% accuracy. In short, two times out of three, the machines were able to recognize whether the plants were communicating the cutting of one of their sections or the lack of water. Not only:

In addition to tobacco and tomato, in fact, also the plants of wheat ( Triticum aestivum ), corn ( Zea mays ) and grapes ( Vitis vinifera ) have in turn emitted noises when ” they were thirsty” . The study represents a pioneering work of its kind and should not be confused by the music produced by the conversion of electrical impulses of plants :

Hadany’s own team had already demonstrated that plants can also hear : a 2019 study  shows that some primroses ( Oenothera drummondii ) release a sweeter nectar when exposed to the sound of a flying bee . Mycologists, on the other hand, have demonstrated that the mycelium , the long underground network created by mushrooms, puts trees in communication with each other, also allowing the transit of nutrients from a healthy specimen to a similar one in difficulty. Video links: