It really is going to be a moral issue for the militant self-righteous ones (I’m thinking about PETA and not the “People Eating Tasty Animals” kind) that keep telling us that we Normals should never be able to eat meat or use any animal derived products. Seriously, what will they consume now that some researchers have found that plants can actually make noises that have been spoken about as “speech”?
Stressed plants ‘scream,’ and it sounds like popping bubble wrap
A study of tomato and tobacco plants suggests they emit ultrasonic popping sounds when dehydrated or physically damaged.When deprived of water or snipped with scissors, plants emit a flurry of staccato “screams” that are too high-frequency for humans to hear, a study suggests. When lowered into a range that human ears can detect, these stress-induced pops sound like someone furiously tap dancing across a field of bubble wrap.
Although humans cannot hear these ultrasonic pops without technological assistance, various mammals, insects and even other plants may be able to detect these noises in the wild and respond to them, researchers reported Thursday (March 30) in the journal Cell(opens in new tab). (The same researchers first shared their popping-plant discovery in 2019 on the preprint database bioRxiv, but the work has now been peer-reviewed.)
…On average, healthy plants let out less than one pop per hour, but the stressed plants emitted about 11 to 35, depending on the plant species and stressor. Drought-stressed tomato plants were noisiest, with some plants emitting more than 40 pops per hour.
…Although the researchers gathered these recordings by setting microphones about 4 inches (10 centimeters) away from the plants, they suggest that these ultrasonic sounds could potentially be heard by mammals and insects with great hearing from 9.8 to 16.4 feet (3 to 5 meters) away.
Now, the report talks about how this new knowledge may help in cultivation and how farmers can better tend to their crops. NOTHING in the post, however, talks about plants being sentient and that these plants are just having a gay old time party going on like neighbors at a porch party. However, like at a porch party, signals are being sent out and not all of them are good ones.
The ‘Grok is a politics/culture blog and when I read about this, I instantly drifted to that corner of politics dedicated to Vegans and their constant mantra that everyone “Not Them” are killers of other beings. In their minds, after all, a catepillar is the moral equivalent of a human. Congrats guys, for after all that crying about me loving a tender, juicy, and tasty prime rib, it looks like you’ve been doing the same to plants – harming plants by harvesting them (like animals are harvested) and those plants have been screaming about it since forever.
It seems that all of the Eco-socialist types want to remove animal protein from our diets because raising animals causes too many greenhouse gases. The Vegans tell us that ANY animal, once raised, can feel pain so it is unethical to kill them for our diets.
It’s that latter part that is going to put them onto the point of the needle of a moral dilemma of their own making. Now that they know that plants know when they are under attack and can tell the environment that, shouldn’t they now forego both animal and plant-based foods? What does this mean – a diet free existence? Ha!
THAT’S when it is going to be fun to watch the self-justification and deer-in-headlight howling begin. No matter what they decided, based on their ethical/religious beliefs they’ve been yammering about for decades, they’re boxed into…nothingness. That’s right – there’s nothing left for them to eat, is there? And nothing left to hammer us with.
No matter which they they turn, they will run into their self-erected moral walls.
I can sit here and laugh like a fool in watching them, being dumbfounded, that their major jabbing against we Normals has just disappeared into a deep maw of their own making. Their “we are better than you because we don’t eat meat” has turned into “we eat plants and now we’re as bad as the rest of you”.
Good times, good times.
