Distressed Plants ‘Scream’ When Uprooted! Scientists Record Their Voice

It may sound unbelievable but plants scream in distress when they are uprooted for harvest. Scientists have recorded these screams of plants in distress.

Interestingly the sounds made by the plants cannot be heard by the human ears. According to scientists, the sounds made by the plants in distress are polling or clicking noise in ultrasonic frequencies outside the range of human hearing. The sound increases when the plant becomes stressed.

The scientists at the Tel Aviv University in Israel have discovered this astounding new information about plants. Their study is published in Cell. As per the researchers, this could be one of the ways that plants use to communicate their distress to the world around them. There are some animals that can hear these ultrasonic sounds made by the plants.

According to the scientists, plants interact with insects and other animals all the time. In incidents where plants are under stress, they undergo some dramatic changes – one of them being some powerful aromas. They can also change their colour and shape.

The distressed included plants that were studied were having their stems cut or were dehydrated. The scientists then trained a machine learning algorithm to differentiate between the sounds produced by unstressed plants, cut plants, and dehydrated plants.

The team found that the sound of distressed plant was far too high-pitched for humans to make out, and detectable within a radius of over a metre, the Science Alert report said.

But it’s not yet clear how the plants produce the noises. But unstressed plants don’t make much noise at all.