Science Vs - The Secret World of Plants

Episode Date: September 28, 2021

Plants aren’t just sitting around looking cute; they’re doing all sorts of stuff, like defending themselves, and even warning other plants about danger. Today, we’re talking all about the weird and wily world of plants with Professor Beronda Montgomery from Michigan State University. She has a new book out called “Lessons From Plants.”  Transcript: https://bit.ly/3kQ2bHg  This episode was produced by Taylor White, with help from Wendy Zukerman, Nick DelRose, Rose Rimler, Meryl Horn and Michelle Dang. Fact checking by Taylor White and Nick DelRose. Mix and sound design by Catherine Anderson and Bumi Hidaka. Music written by Bumi Hidaka and Peter Leonard. Special thanks to the Zukerman family and Joseph Lavelle Wilson. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Today, we've got a mini episode for you. We're digging up the dirt on plants. Recently, we had a chat with Professor Veronda Montgomery. She studies plants at Michigan State University and told us all these wild stories about how weird and how clever plants can be. And we just had to tell you all about it. So Veronda is a massive nerd. When she was little, she did this experiment into how well different types of paper can burn. So, I was very much into science when I was little. And when I was six, I talked my nine-year-old sister into being my research assistant. And I had gathered all these different papers, toilet paper, writing paper my research assistant. And I had gathered all these different

papers, toilet paper, writing paper, construction paper. And I wanted to set them on fire all at the same time to see which one burned most quickly. And my sister was supposed to be the lookout and it got a little bit out of hand. She quit her job and ran away and it was problematic. So that was one of my first science experiments. Wait, wait, wait. Well, now I want to know. So was it the toilet paper that burnt the fastest? It was that one. And that's also the one that fell off of the table and started to cause problems. But, you know, I had a hypothesis and I was right.

It just didn't quite work out like I intended. At this point in her life, Veronda was not that excited about plants. I mean, unless she was setting them on fire. Well, because if you look at them, they just kind of look like they're sitting there. And if you're not paying close attention to them, a new leaf might come out. But it's not as, you know, it's not like watching puppies run around or all of those exciting physical motions that we see with animals. So they, in a lot of ways, just look like they're sitting there not doing anything too exciting.

But once she went off to college, that's where her love of plants really took root. Hmm. Baronda learned that plants aren't just sitting in the dirt, popping out leaves and flowers, looking pretty for us. But rather, they have a whole bunch of tricks up their leaves that help them to survive. The ways in which they thrive and defend themselves

was just really fascinating to me. So when danger strikes, plants don't have weapons, like guns, and they can't run away. But instead, they have other ways of protecting themselves with chemicals. Like, studies have found that if a bug, say a very hungry caterpillar, starts munching on a tomato plant...

They produce chemicals that inhibit the caterpillar's ability to digest their food, so they can make something that makes the caterpillar's ability to digest their food so they can make something that makes the caterpillar sick. Oh, wow. They slowly kind of poison the caterpillar to save themselves. Yes. Yes. Yeah. So sometimes they'll straight up pump out nasty chemicals to mess with the bugs' insides. But sometimes plants will go even more hardcore, bringing in a bigger, brawnier insect for help. Yeah. Veronda told us that some plants use chemicals to attract predators that will then eat the bug that's attacking them.

Okay, so imagine an aphid chewing on a leaf. Nom, nom, nom, nom, nom. The plant then springs into action, popping these chemicals into the air and so it says what you like to eat is here and available and then they attract a wasp that uses that little bug as food and so then that plant is then protected wow it's really i told you plants are super cool much cooler than anything we We just say, please leave me alone. And what's really special about all of this chemical warfare going on is that plants aren't just using it to help themselves. They can use their powers to warn other plants,

friends, if you will, of what's going on. So when under attack, some plants can send out these chemical messages that then get picked up by their leafy neighbours. And so one plant will say that I've been damaged, you should be aware that there are herbivores in the environment, so put your defences up. For example, studies in corn have looked into this. Scientists will mimic an attack

and then watch as the corn pumps out these so-called warning chemicals into the air. And then, soon after, the neighbouring plants, despite not being under attack in that moment, well, they'll pick up on those chemical signals and see them as a kind of call to arms. So they get ready to fight too. Pretty amazing, right? Veronda says that some scientists are starting to think about all these chemicals flying about as a kind of language. Can plants talk? So I think plants can talk. Plants definitely have a language. Many of us have, you know, this kind of innate response to think of things through our understanding of our presence in the

world. And so we think about talking as words. We think about hearing as detecting the words. And so often we're looking at other organisms through the lens of our understanding of our place in the world. And we wouldn't have imagined that language could be a chemical when we use vowels and nouns and words. It's really special because when you see a plant just sitting there loafing about, you don't think they're chatting. Exactly. Yes, exactly. Very much so. And Bronda says that even though plants don't speak our language, we are connected to them. I mean, in these obvious ways, like we eat them and plants make oxygen that we need to breathe, but in less obvious ways too, which

Baronda started thinking about on this recent trip she made to South Carolina. Baronda was visiting a cotton plantation. It had been one of the South's largest plantations. Enslaved people had been forced to work there for generations. And Baronda went because her sister and son really wanted to go. I had no interest. I'm not going to even lie. I just, I wasn't drawn to it, but this is what they wanted to do. So I went and that day it was about to rain. And I actually was like, okay, well, if it rains, we won't have to stay long. But her attitude changed once she saw this beautiful oak tree. It was a massive tree with heaps of green moss hanging down from its billowing branches. Our tour guide explained that it was 600 years old.

And it occurred to me that the tree was there the entire time, that these enslaved people who could have been related to us were there. And for Baronda, looking up at this oak, she started thinking about the relationship between these people who might have been her ancestors and this tree. And that's because when we breathe out carbon dioxide, it can get captured in these little openings in a tree's leaves. And knowing that carbon dioxide becomes a part of the plants that take it up, it occurred to me that the breath of these people was a part of the tree. And so really there's a direct connection with the carbon dioxide we breathe being put into the wood

of a tree. And so at some level in that tree was the captured carbon dioxide of my enslaved ancestors. And so I really felt a deep physical connection with that particular tree. But it also got me to thinking about how daily as we're going through our lives, we're really putting our carbon dioxide into the physical nature of plants around us. You wrote in an article about this that trees, quote, carry the very essence of humans, both past and present in their bodies. Absolutely. Absolutely. Did you just stand under the tree while everyone else was? Yeah, my son and my sister had gone off and I literally was there looking at the tree,

thinking about it. And it's really quite a joke because when this article did come out in American Scientist, my son said, I can't believe you didn't even want to go and you wrote a whole paper about it. That was Professor Baronda Montgomery, a plant scientist at Michigan State. She has a new book out right now called Lessons from Plants, where she talks about all the cool things that we can learn from plants. It's really great. You should check it out. It's called Lessons from Plants. That's Science Versus. This episode was produced by Taylor White, with help from me, Wendy Zuckerman, Nick Delrose,

and the rest of the Science Versus team. Mix and sound design by Catherine Anderson. For full credits, check out our show notes.