Climbing Plants
I’m growing a cucumber plant at the moment and have noticed an interesting phenomenon; every so often it will put out a long, straight, skinny tendril which it uses to cling onto things as it grows. Everyone knows about this, you see it happening with peas and beans as well.
But do you realise just how fast this happens? The photo above is the result of only an hour or so of contact with the bamboo pole that I adjusted this morning. It boggles my mind to think what processes must be involved that cause the cells that come into contact with something to contract so rapidly. You could literally touch your finger to a straight tendril and have it cling to you over the span of a couple of cups of tea.
very cool mate!
Yes I have noticed. Plants are awesome.
Ever wondered what life would be like if we were shorter lived and our conception of time were faster, or much longer lived (such as tree-scale lifespan, or geological-scale lifespan) and our conception of time were slower.
Of course, even if our conception of time were slower relative to ourselves time would seem ‘normal’ but I can’t help but think that plants would begin to look a lot like animals. Think of the Attenborough-esque life-of-plants time-lapse stuff; the garden becomes a leafy battlefield!
Yes, when you see the time-lapse photography in The Private Life of Plants where the brambles are “feeling” their way across the ground and vines are “searching” for handholds it’s difficult not to anthropomorphise.
But it leads me to ask questions about things like awareness, suffering and purpose and whether they are a gradient. I guess it makes perfect sense when you understand life has common ancestry. Why not common features to varying degrees?
Is a plant is ‘aware’ of the bamboo pole? Does it ‘suffer’ when you cut it? Does it have ‘purpose’ when it moves its leaves to face the sun?
If it is capable of awareness, suffering and purpose in a very limited and purely naturalistic way then I see no reason to invoke anything more than biology for our relatively complex awareness, suffering and purpose. (Unlike Descartes)
Sorry, too deep. Yes, plants are awesome.
Very cool! Would be fun to see some time-laps video.
About the varying degrees of awareness – intriguing notion, isn’t it?!
Cool pic – and fascinating questions as always. As far as I am aware the cells don’t contract with thigmotropism but rather the cells that touch the bamboo pole produce the plant hormone auxin and that is then transported to the untouched cells on the other side which elongate in response, hence the bending.
) so I’d tend question how plant like I am rather than how human like the plant is – if that makes sense!
And yes it raises good questions when you move onto humans. I have recently been very aware how much I am influenced by hormones (another story –
Ahhhhh! Even trickier! I noticed this morning that the cucumber tendrils start off curly, straighten out and then curl again on contact. I wonder if a similar process goes into straightening them?
And hormones, yeah, similar process only more complex I suppose. All these chemical interactions form a nice, smooth gradient of complexity until we encounter animals with brains where all of a sudden the chemical ‘directives’ become negotiable depending on the brain’s ability to override them. Which is where we find increasingly complex switches that can be formed by experience as well as by some rudimentary genetic templates.
i.e. for a worm it might be “IF x-smell GOTO direction-of-smell” but a more complex animal might be “IF x-smell AND NOT y-heat GOTO direction-of-smell ELSE GOTO opposite-direction”. Even more complex animals would be capable of altering these instructions with experience. Of course it wouldn’t be laid out like that but I imagine something similar would be happening at a chemical and electrical level.
And don’t even go there with human brains!
(Sorry, I’m saying this stuff like I actually know what I’m talking about; let me be clear, I’m just making it up as I go!)