MessageToEagle.com - In our article
"Amazing Phenomenon Of Singing Plants" we described how plants can sing and even make music.
World of plants is both amazing and surprising because they possess many other impressive and very sophisticated abilities to learn and communicate, sense danger and know how to successfully avoid predators.
Like we humans, plants can feel, see, smell and remember, according to Daniel Chamovitz, director of the Manna Center for Plant Biosciences at Tel Aviv University who unveils the surprising world of plants
Mimosa pudica L. - Sensitive Plant
Even noise can have ripple effects on plants.
Plants are able to 'talk' using sound
says Dr Monica Gagliano an Australian Research Council research fellow at The
University of Western Australia's Centre for Evolutionary Biology. Now, Dr Gagliano,, delivers solid evidence to support her theories. Actually plants can 'learn' and it's definitely not science fiction.
Her new article - written with Associate Professor Michael Renton and Dr Martial Depczynski from UWA's School of Plant Biology and Oceans Institute respectively, and Professor Stefano Mancuso at the University of Florence in Italy - is titled "Experience teaches plants to learn faster and forget slower in environments where it matters". Dr Gagliano and her team show that Mimosa pudica plants can learn and remember just as well as it would be expected of animals, but of course, they do it all without a brain.
Researchers trained Mimosa plants' short- and long-term memories under both high and low-light environments by repeatedly dropping water on them using a custom-designed apparatus (Mimosa folds its leaves in response to the drop). They show how Mimosa plants stopped closing their leaves when they learnt that the repeated disturbance had no real
damaging consequence. Mimosa plants were able to acquire the learnt behaviour in a matter of seconds and as in animals, learning was faster in less favourable environment (i.e. low light).
