In a scientific discovery that might someday leave vegans with nothing to eat with a clear conscience, researchers in Israel say tomatoes “scream” when they’re cut from their stems. The scientists out of Tel Aviv University say tomatoes, and other plants, emit sounds when under stress, much as animals do — it’s just that our human ears can’t detect it.
“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,” noted senior study author and evolutionary biologist Lilach Hadany in a media release. The scientists even added a sample of such sounds, lowered in frequency so we can hear it.
While scientists already knew that plants emit vibrations, this is the first time it has been revealed that plant communication is airborne, and can be heard by fellow plants and other species. They said stressed plants emitted more sounds than un-stressed plants. Researcher Lilach Hadani concluded; “We found that many plants—corn, wheat, grape, and cactus plants, for example—emit sounds when they are stressed. 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.”
Now back to those screaming tomatoes: The researchers set up recorders in soundproof rooms and clocked several kinds of plants, including tomatoes, as they were put under stress — either by denying them water or cutting them from their stems.
Sure enough, an algorithm was able to determine that the various sounds emitted from the stressed plants differed from those that were not being harmed. Even wilder, the algorithm was able to suss out which plants were being denied water and which were being cut, just by the sounds the plants made.
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