Sound and plants - sound and plants (Apr/08/2006 )
Sounds have affected on animals behaviors but it has any effect on plants?
Mozart do... as told by urban legend...
"Mozart für die Pflanzen"
there have been made experiments wich lead to the opinion that yes, music does influence plant growth. but i dont know details. ive read it in the book "secret life of plants" but they never mention details. but it seems that plants do like Mozart...
my plants thrive, at home and in the lab, and I play lots of blues
When I was a PhD student, I used to help run a fun undergraduate practical class where the students could design their own stress experiments. They could choose anything they wanted (lights, temperatures, solutions of metal ions...) and we had to run about the building setting up the conditions. At the end we checked transcription of some stress-induced genes and levels of anthocyanins and stuff (appropriate to the expt.). Needless to say we had on occassion to play Motorhead in the cold room and the like.
Anyway I think I'm sure in remembering that in the hands of our students and in only one repeat, the plants didn't seem overly stressed by even the hardest rock!
Amikins suggests that blues makes them happy and we found that heavy metal doesn't get them excited. Maybe they just don't get it
I remember seeing this on the news sometime back...
This guy who grows grapes plays soft music in his vineyard and apparently his yield is much better thna his neigbors and makes for better tasting wine...donno if it is true but i think i saw it on 60 minutes....not sure though..
Mythbusters on discovery channel did a show on this-- they found it was plausible but here is a botanist pointing out the problems with their experiment...
off the top of my head i cant think of any reasons why plants that can detect sounds might have an evolutionary advantage?
so i find it difficult to believe that it would just spontaneously arise
I don't find it hard to believe...perhaps there are some plants that produce/secrete different types of stress chemicals/hormones, etc in response to certain noises, associated with vegetarian predators...perhaps other types of noise, i.e. beneficial birds singing nearby, beneficial insects 'humming' or 'buzzing'...would result in secretion of other chemicals/hormones to help attract these helpful creatures
anyways, I'm no botanist but I can see how this would arise, and perhaps 'beneficial' music mimics something they hear in nature, some wavelength or frequency of sound that the plants 'like' and respond positively to?
hmmm when i think about the amount of energy a plant has to put into developing stress reactive compounds, in response to a particular frequency, knowing that it might only be transient, it seems hard to believe, I mean if it has occured it should be rather easy to quantify, yet this hasn't happened.
Also plants do secrete different hormones in response to predators to alert other plants to produce natural defense molecules (alkaloids etc), but these are all in response to a physical feeding/attack of a predator. As for pollinators etc, the existing system of rewarding pollinators seems much more efficient than producing pollen molecules in response to the sound of a pollinator, it would take to long
all in all it seems that their are far better ways to respond to the natural environment than via sound.