Animals react to the sounds issued by plants, suggest new research, opening up the possibility that an invisible ecosystem can exist between them.
In the first evidence of this type, a team from the University of Tel Aviv found that females avoided laying their eggs on tomato plants if they made noises that they associated with distress, indicating that they can be unhealthy.
The team was the first to show two years ago that plants shout when they are in distress or unhealthy.
The sounds are outside the range of human hearing, but can be perceived by many insects, bats and certain mammals.
“This is the first demonstration of an animal that responds to sounds produced by a plant,” said Professor Yossi Yovel at Tel Aviv University.
“These are speculation at this stage, but it may be that all kinds of animals make decisions according to the sounds they hear plants, such as pollinating or hiding inside or eat the plant.”
The researchers made a series of carefully controlled experiences to ensure that butterflies responded to the sound and not to the appearance of plants.
They will now investigate the sounds that the different plants make and if other species make decisions according to them.
“You may think that there could be many complicated interactions, and this is the first step,” said Professor Yovel.
Another area of survey is whether plants can transmit information to sound by sound and act in response, such as the conservation of their water in drought conditions, according to Professor Lilach Hadany, also from the University of Tel Aviv.
“It’s an exciting question,” she told BBC News.
“If a plant is stressed, the body most concerned about its other plants and they can react in several ways.”
AcquireResearchers point out that plants are not sensitive. Sounds are produced by physical effects caused by a change in their local conditions. What today’s discovery shows is that these sounds can be useful to other animals, and possibly plants, capable of perceiving these sounds.
If this is the case, then plants and animals have designed the ability to produce and listen to sounds for their mutual advantage, according to Professor Hadany.
“Plants could evolve to make more sounds or stronger if they were advantageous and that animal hearing can evolve accordingly so that they can take this enormous amount of information.
“It is a large unexplored field – a whole world waiting to be discovered.”
In the experience, the researchers focused on female butterflies, who generally lay their eggs on tomato plants so that the larvae can feed on them once.
The hypothesis was that night butterflies are looking for the best possible site to lay their eggs – a healthy plant that can properly feed the larvae. So when the plant signals that it is dehydrated and under stress, the question was whether the butterflies would evolve and avoid laying eggs on it?
The answer was that they do not lay the eggs, because of the sound that plants produced.
Research was published in the Elife journal.
