Scientists recorded the sound of plants “screaming” when harvested. The sound is not the same as what humans make, but rather a popping or clicking noise at ultrasonic frequencies that are outside the range of human hearing. The sound increases when the plant is stressed, according to researchers from Tel Aviv University in Israel who reported their findings in Cell.
The report added that this could be one way for plants to express their anguish to the world around them.
Plants undergo tremendous changes when stressed,
“Even in a quiet field, there are actually sounds that we don’t hear, and those sounds carry information. There are animals that can hear these sounds, so there is the possibility that a lot of acoustic interaction is occurring,” Lilach Hadany, an evolutionary biologist at the institution, told Science Direct about the 2023 study.
“Plants interact with insects and other animals all the time, and many of these organisms use sound for communication, so it would be very suboptimal for plants to not use sound at all,” she added.
Plants undergo tremendous changes when stressed, one of which is the release of intense scents. They can also modify their color and shape.
But Hadany and her team wanted to know if plants make noise. To find out, they observed tomato and tobacco plants in stressful and unstressed situations. Their concept of distress included plants with their stems clipped or that were dehydrated.
The researchers then developed a machine learning system to distinguish between the sounds made by unstressed, cut, and dehydrated plants.
The study discovered that the sound of a disturbed plant was far too high-pitched for humans to hear and could be detected within a radius of more than a meter, according to Science Alert.
However, it is still unclear how the plants make the noises. Meanwhile, they discovered that unstressed plants don’t make much noise.