Plant communication

[dogjones]

This is interesting.

Recently Stuefer and his colleagues were the first to demonstrate that clover plants warn each other via the network links if enemies are nearby. If one of the plants is attacked by caterpillars, the other members of the network are warned via an internal signal. Once warned, the intact plants strengthen their chemical and mechanical resistance so that they are less attractive for advancing caterpillars.

What I'd like to know is, what is this 'internal signal' exactly?

 

[Henners]

It's a logical impossibility.

To get from one plant to another it would need to be an "external signal" or, as we call them where I come from, a "signal".

It's a chemical - a plant pheromone.

 

[Overman]

Are Clovers connected underground?

 

[Henners]

No, I'm talking rubbish.

The plants are all connected under the ground. Plants have two transport systems. Xylem for water, and phloem for nutrients. Phloem uses cytoplasmic streaming through connected cells. So the signal is a plant hormone.

 

[flume]

I looked at a paper from June:
Costs and benefits of induced resistance in a clonal plant network
Sara Gomez. Vı´t Latzel. Yolanda M. Verhulst. Josef F. Stuefer
Oecologia (2007) 153:921–930
There may be others, but in this paper they just looked at changes in growth but did not look for the signal.

 

[sthomson]

to demonstrate that clover plants warn each other via the network links if enemies are nearby.

A big beef with science news is that it tries to describe plant behavior in human terms. This makes it sound fantastical.

In this case, it describes "clover plants", as if each stalk is a separate plant. Really, though, I think it's more helpful to see the whole thing as one giant organism, while the plants are connected by stolons.