https://acousticalsociety.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/05/Pro... (page 194):
Flower visitors, including pollinators, produce characteristic sounds through flapping wing movements during flight. Recent research underscores the value of studying these acoustic signals to develop non-invasive, efficient tools for monitoring pollinator communities. Additionally, these sounds may provide key information to flowering plants, potentially influencing their resource allocation to attract pollinators, thus impacting their fitness. In this study, we investigated the acoustic properties of airborne sounds generated by recording different flying visitors to Antirrhinum flowers in the field. The audio recordings were annotated according to the observed flying behaviors and analyzed using nonlinear time-series analysis. We also conducted playback experiments to evaluate how plants respond to the buzzing sounds of insects. Our results reveal that distinct flying behaviors, such as hovering, landing, and takeoff, produce unique acoustic signatures. Furthermore, plants exhibit reactions to the vibroacoustic stimuli from pollinators, suggesting potentially adaptive responses. These findings provide valuable insight for developing passive acoustic monitoring tools for flying insects and may inspire further research in the field of plant–pollinator interaction.
Then again: nothing wants to be eaten...
Lab grown meat can't come fast enough: ethical flesh to consume.
Yeah, but 6 US states have now banned it
Humans are a billion miles away from considering plant preferences
So go ahead and take the apple because it will drop otherwise. And take the fruits. If you want to go all out, go with a Jain diet system where carrots and mushrooms are not ok but mints and herbs are a-ok.
It is impossible for more complex organism to live on Earth and not feast on other organisms, so you could say I should avoid eating plants too. Correct, but since I cannot avoid killing other beings, I have chosen the path of less overall suffering.
I don't believe you've actually thought any of this through in an intellectually rigorous way. Your choices just allow you to falsely believe that you're somehow superior to people with other priorities and values.
The further away, phylogenetically, we come from the human species, the more difficult it is for me to assess if a being is suffering (i.e., experiencing unnecessary pain or suffering), but based on my observations of plants, and my knowledge of their anatomy and physiology, I have concluded that yes, they may feel something — even pain — but it doesn't look much like they do. But I could still be wrong. It's still how my reasoning goes. If one day I am faced with more tangible evidence, then I will obviously have to evaluate my behaviour. Until then I choose what seems to be the road of less suffering.
40+ years ago I worked for several months at a “chicken farm” where chicks were raised from “Easter chickens” to fullgrown chickens in roosts of 10_000 chickens each. It was a waking nightmare. It is _the_ most horrible experience I have had in my life because of the obvious and extensive suffering of the animals, and the experience made me choose to become a vegetarian because I didn't want to contribute to that specific suffering. Later evidence has shown that pigs and cattle and other farmed animals are experiencing suffering too because of the way humans are raising them. I simply don't want to be a part of that. Period.
My choice of diet doesn't change my value as a human being even one iota (the same way the value of any other human being isn't measured by their choice of diet). I could be very very wrong about the whole thing, and in that way making things unnecessarily complicated for myself (and my fellow human beings), but I cannot live on Earth without making decisions, and I try to make the best I can — just like all other humans do. All other humans could be right, for all I know. I could be the fool here. Who am I to judge.
I find a more compelling argument that it is generally awful to end something's joyful existence and experience. But apparently not compelling enough to dramatically alter my diet much. But enough to cause me to save/relocate some bugs in some cases rather than kill them.
A 'guess' is less than accurate.
If there are opportunities to do things with more respect and dignity, for either plants or animals, they should be done. But at the same time we shouldn't feel so morose about the reality of the situation of life on this planet where literally everything eats something else, usually in a very brutal manner.
I would not call animals who kill other animals for evil. They don't have a choice. It is their nature.
Humans, by virtue of their empathy (which can be extended beyond their own species) and intelligence (however we decide to evaluate that), do have a choice.
I would definitely wait for a peer reviewed article before paying any attention to this. People love "plants can hear things" stories.
aren't plants well suited with all their small and moving parts to some-what percieve that from their envirorment, even if its not literal hearing?
Hearing pollinators does seem somewhat unlikely but still plausible.
Mechanoreceptors: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mechanoreceptors_(in_plants)
Plants don't have ear drums and you can't feel a an insect buzz in your chest.
Guess what we've found in plants? Tiny hairs (trichomes) connected to mechanoreceptors.
So plants have the nearly the same physical structures that animals use for hearing, but not only that, they also have similar mechanosensitive ion channels too.
If I recall correctly: flowers are often shaped like dish antennas to collect sound vibration, and plants can distinguish the frequency of wing beats of their preferred pollinator from frequencies of other insects, and will act only for their pollinators.
[0] https://www.amazon.com/Light-Eaters-Unseen-Intelligence-Unde...
For example the most amazing claims in the book were around the ability of Boquila trifoliolata to dynamically mimic other plants.
see this old HN thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31301454
But when one looks more closely the research, the behavior isn't as dramatic as Zoe made it sound, and the research may not be so strong, e.g. :
but in reference to the linked article, i will say that the researchers interviewed in the book (and i got that sense for Zoe as well) were in agreement with you that the research didn't support a vision-based mechanism. but everyone agrees that the imitation is going on. the researchers in the book suggest a gene transfer-based mechanism instead! (mentioned briefly in your linked article)
It makes me wonder how many other forms of input plants might be sensing that we simply don’t recognize yet. Nature keeps surprising me the more I read about this kind of stuff.
This is called "anthropomorphizing," the assignment of human traits to non-human entities without evidence. Assigning human traits to non-human processes tends to distort evidence to fit a preconceived narrative.
Look at the title. The terms "hear," "produce," and "in response" all imply human motivations to a process that may instead be an unsentimental evolutionary process in which nature blindly selects an outcome based only on fitness.
This is why Charles Darwin was reluctant to publish his theory -- it implied that nature blindly created outcomes solely based on fitness, not recognizable human qualities as this article suggests. Darwin believed people would reject his theory because it was unsentimental, unromantic, sometimes cruel. And he was right -- people accepted natural selection only after evidence prevailed over sentiment.
This doesn't imply that nature isn't beautiful, it only argues that nature isn't modeled after people. And those who think nature has no sense of humor ... haven't heard about the Platypus.
You are inserting "sentiment" to "hear," "produce," and "in response." These are physical actions. Or do you assert trees don't produce fruit in response to good growing conditions?
In response to the rock falling, a large sound was produced, and it startled a fox that heard it. No anthropomorphism.
Anthropomorphism is assigning human qualities onto non-humans. Like my first sentence.
That's correct -- it's not a response as that term is defined, indeed use of the word "response" implies a misunderstanding of natural selection and suggests inheritance of acquired traits.
In a population of trees in the same environment, some produce more fruit due to random genetic variations between individuals. For chemical and biological reasons those specific trees blindly ascend over other genotypes and are over time more likely to prevail over those less fit. That's not a response as we understand the word, it's a product of mathematics and genetics.
> In response to the rock falling, a large sound was produced, and it startled a fox that heard it. No anthropomorphism.
In fact, assuming we assign a human emotion to the fox, as you did, that would be an example of anthropomorphizing.
marojejian•8mo ago
>In contrast they respond to the sound of nectar-stealing non-pollinators by cutting back on sugar.
So there is some discrimination in their hearing.
xhkkffbf•8mo ago
creaturemachine•8mo ago
gus_massa•8mo ago
IAmBroom•8mo ago
nemo•8mo ago
Aloisius•8mo ago
Sometimes it's just an anatomy mismatch - like very small bee species and big open flowers.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nectar_robbing
nemo•8mo ago
They're true parasites, piercing the flower to drink nectar without any chance of pollination.
HelloMcFly•8mo ago
jbotz•8mo ago
jmcgough•8mo ago
Jabrov•8mo ago
This sounds like a really wild take. Just because something has been evolving for millions of years doesn't necessarily mean it's evolving information processing capabilities. It's patently obvious to me that the information processing capabilities of animals (eg. just vision alone) are far beyond those of plants.
deadbabe•8mo ago
nkrisc•8mo ago
That is true. And look how different we’ve become.
> and so there is likely to be equivalent information processing complexity to be found in them
That’s quite a leap. I think precisely because plants and animals have evolved separately for so you can’t make that assumption. Maybe plants hasn’t not simply because they don’t need to, as a fundamental consequence of their differing physiology.
rusticpenn•8mo ago