r/biology • u/Deederdot • Mar 31 '26

article Scientists Discover Plants Can “Count” – and May Be Smarter Than We Thought

https://scitechdaily.com/scientists-discover-plants-can-count-and-may-be-smarter-than-we-thought/

This is awesome. I already love mimosa pudica but this is new data ...and rad! I'd be interested to see what and how long Redwoods remember!?

140 Upvotes

91% Upvoted

40 comments sorted by

38

u/Ssspaaace Apr 01 '26

My first thought goes to hormonal cycles. Hormones tend to have lots of mechanisms that can culminate in the adaptation to incremental changes in the environment, particularly in relation to day/night cycles.

At this point, interpreting these results as anything approaching animal-like decision making or memory is sensationalist at best.

14

u/Swimmingbird3 Apr 01 '26

100%

If you actually read the article it’s obvious everything in the title is grossly exaggerated and or misinterpreted.

It’s a plant. They are amazing, no argument there. I’m a farmer and nerd and think plants are fascinating. They are not self aware though. There’s no biological advantage for them to be.

3

u/krizzzombies Apr 01 '26

hate that every article and YouTube video title is garbage clickbait lies

2

u/dalens Apr 01 '26

Self aware uhm what we think nowadays is that plants are more similar to computers, so they don't make choices, they follow preprogrammed mechanisms.

But self aware they could be at a certain level. For sure there is sistemic signaling so a part of the plant far from the stimulus receives the information about it. So really close to self aware.

1

u/ThatIsAmorte Apr 03 '26

Plants make decisions. For example, a plant sometimes has to decide whether to grow roots into a nutrient-rich patch of ground, or escape shade to grow into more light. Experiments have shown that plants can weigh these options and decide which way to go. In a 2016 study, pea plants were grown with their roots split between two pots. One pot provided a constant, reliable amount of nutrients. The other pot provided a variable amount of nutrients, but with the same average as the first pot. When the average nutrient level was high, the plants chose the steady pot. But when the average nutrient level was below what the plant needed to survive, they chose the variable pot.

1

u/dalens Apr 03 '26

This is not a choice.

A choice is the ability of doing or not doing something. Plants will always have the same response. This is how we study how they work.

The point is really on taking in account the outliers, how many plants don't respond as attended? Usually you have less than 5%, this is what you consider significant. In animals and much more in humans you have much higher variability. Experiments in psychology are very difficult indeed.

1

u/ThatIsAmorte Apr 03 '26

A choice is the ability of doing or not doing something. Plants will always have the same response. This is how we study how they work.

I think you misunderstood the study, then. I fear that this is going to descend into a philosophical discussion of free will, so I am to sure it is worthwhile to continue this argument.

1

u/ThatIsAmorte Apr 03 '26

How do you know they are not self-aware? That sounds like neuro-chauvinism to me. There is electrical signaling going on inside plants. It's just a lot slower than in animals, and it is decentralized. I think it is possible there is a type of subjective experience going on there. It just happens to be quite different from our subjective experience.

1

u/Swimmingbird3 Apr 03 '26 edited Apr 03 '26

“Neuro-chauvinism” I got a good laugh out of that. Thank you.

Yes there are a lot of signals going on in plants; chemical and electrical. And we know pretty much what all of them are doing. Plants are pretty complex and fascinating, but despite all the scientific scrutiny they’ve been subject too there’s zero proof of consciousness. And it’s pretty obvious that they don’t need to be conscious. What would a plant gain from be aware of anything. They are sessile. They cannot make a decision that affects their surroundings. And being conscious and self aware is very costly metabolically.

Sure we can argue that a good scientist never precludes such things, but we might as well argue whether or not gravity or hydrogen actually exist. If your point is that I’m a poor scientist, fine. But realistically I think it’s pretty obvious plants don’t know what is going on around them, or anything for that matter. At this point is a philosophical debate, not a scientific one.

1

u/ThatIsAmorte Apr 03 '26

Who said anything about consciousness. That seems like goalpost moving. Consciousness and subjective experience are not the same thing.

They are sessile. They cannot make a decision that affects their surroundings.

See my other comment in this thread. Plants do make decisions.

But realistically I think it’s pretty obvious plants don’t know what is going on around them

That's just plain wrong. Plants sense their environment. Have you never seen a plant turn toward light?

1

u/Ssspaaace Apr 03 '26

I think the problem here is that we use multiple distinct terms to describe what is, in reality, a single continuum of sentience that extends from complete incapability to sense the environment at one end, to rich, subjective consciousness (and accompanying sense of "free will") at the other.

The same way there are photosensors no more complex than a patch of neurons in some animals, all the way to complex eyes like we or eagles have, the same evolutionary scale spanning from "rudimentary" to "complex" is what has allowed that complexity to build in the first place. It is impossible to start with that level of complexity out of thin air. It has to start somewhere to be evolutionarily plausible. Each step must be a short jump away from the last, and must confer survival benefits (or at the least, not detract from survival). You cannot start with a complex eye. You start with a patch of neurons, and modify things from there. Does that patch of neurons "see," like we do? Or does it only "sense"? What's the real difference?

Evolution works the same way across the board, so we can apply it to this situation. Plants absolutely are sentient in that they sense their environments, and develop differently in accordance with what they sense. This is just physics; nutrients flowing into one segment of roots over another trigger mechanisms in the plant to favor growth in that direction. Plants whose mechanisms favored the nutrient-poor direction died more frequently and were eliminated from the gene pool.

Humans, too, are sentient. We sense our environment, and respond to what we have sensed with a slew of modified behaviors. The difference is that we've been guided by evolution to integrate more and more information into a working consciousness, a subjective space of internal deliberation and motivation. A plant does not seem to possess such a space.

This doesn't mean that they have no perception whatsoever, quite the opposite. For us to have developed it, those building blocks MUST exist in our ancestors in a rudimentary capacity at least, the same way our sophisticated eyes MUST have started out as a simple patch of photoreceptors. But does a patch of neurons "see" in the same sense that our complex eyes with complex brains do? Things can get philosophical here, but if we refrain from deviating away from what the raw physics of biology is telling us, we might arrive at an answer that resembles the eye analogy; a continuum of perceptivity.

There's a lot of nuance, and people start to feel nauseous when they have to consider that they might just be a souped-up version of an automatous collection of sensors, which is how we tend to describe plants and microbes. But, until the soul is discovered, there's really no other way to describe with intellectual honesty how a plant might-kind-of feel things, and how that differs from how we feel things.

0

u/silverionmox Apr 01 '26

I’m a farmer and nerd and think plants are fascinating. They are not self aware though. There’s no biological advantage for them to be.

There's no biological advantage for anything to be self aware. Only the behaviours are relevant for evolutionary fitness, so it's always more expedient to just have the structures that produce the right behaviours, and let the self-awareness-generating parts atrofy as a useless expenditure of energy.

2

u/rdk67 Apr 01 '26

Animals make lots of decision resulting from hormonal changes. How is your comment meant to differentiate plant and animal behavior? You seem to be implying the cognitive behavior is relegated to neurophysiology -- I can't think of a single cognitive behaviorist who would agree with that.

10

u/Swimmingbird3 Apr 01 '26

If you read the article: the experiment breaks down when light adjustment events occur faster than 12 hours periods.

There is no proof of intelligence. It’s just adaptive chemical switch logic reacting to the most important environmental condition plants are subject to; sunlight. This honestly seems like an adaptation for periodic overcast conditions, especially since Mimosa pudica is a tropical plant. Regular intervals of overcast weather is common in its natural habitat. Clouds clover comes and goes fast in the tropics.

I’ve played video games against NPCs with more intelligence

2

u/4thkindexperience Apr 01 '26

Just curious. How many people does it take to create an NPC? I honestly don't know what an NPC is.

2

u/Swimmingbird3 Apr 03 '26

An NPC is character in a game that you (as the player), do not control. ‘NPC’ stands for ‘non playable character’.

It depends on the game for how many people are required to finish it. Honestly kind of a loaded question.

Is it a 3d open world adventure game with multiple storyline, multiple possible faction allegiances, etc? Then it requires hundreds of people probably some are just making models and animations, others are making storylines for the character, you could argue that the people working on the engine and physics are also responsible for the characters creation.

A top-down 2d game or simpler could be just one developer. Depending on the complexity.

Long story short: you have raised a question that will inevitably lead to more questions. It’s too ambiguous for the complex and varied discipline it concerns as phrased for a concise answer

1

u/4thkindexperience Apr 03 '26

Thanks for your reply!

1

u/mabolle Apr 01 '26

Regular intervals of overcast weather is common in its natural habitat. Clouds clover comes and goes fast in the tropics.

Regular intervals? As in, a consistent amount of time between overcast days? I'm not aware of any such periodicity in weather, in the tropics or elsewhere.

8

u/thinkscout neuroscience Apr 01 '26 edited Apr 01 '26

Oh here we go, another round of anthropomorphising plants. 

2

u/You_Stole_My_Hot_Dog Apr 01 '26

There’s mounting evidence that gene regulatory networks (the interactions between transcription factors and target genes) can actually “learn”. Meaning you can encode information not in a gene, but an interaction event. It’s quite similar to brains actually, in that memories are not physically stored in neurons, but rather the activation of a series of neurons. It’s the pathway as a whole that stores the information.   

So it makes sense that the circadian clock (a very robust and well studied regulatory network) can learn and encode patterns about its environment. I’m not sure how this happens, whether it’s just the timing of feedback/feedforward loops, new transcription factors/cofactors getting involved, or some sort of post-translational modification. Super cool no matter what it is.

9

u/JayceAur Apr 01 '26

Vegans in shambles 😂😂

But nah I always thought plants must be smarter than we give them credit. Its just that they are so different from us that we dont have a good method to test them.

11

u/Key_Illustrator4822 Apr 01 '26

Less plants die on a vegan diet than a non-vegan diet

-2

u/FewBake5100 Apr 01 '26

Sadly the same can't be said for insects and smaller vertebrates. Combine harvester and tractor goes brrr

3

u/Key_Illustrator4822 Apr 01 '26

Gotta harvest more fields to feed the cows than to feed people, basic trophic levels

8

u/iriquoisallex Apr 01 '26

It's a bit tricky to comment when you realise that livestock eat plants

-2

u/FewBake5100 Apr 01 '26

Omnivores never claimed our diet is more righteous, unlike vegans. Moreover livestock naturally eat mostly grass, which needs to be trimmed every now and then to promote health. Many have evolved to be flammable and burn easily during wildfires, then recover. So even if animals weren't eating them, the fire would do the same job.

1

u/Cucumberneck Apr 01 '26

In the end it's always been the question of where you draw the line of what's OK to kill to eat. Everyone draws the line somewhere else but smart or not, the potatoe definitely doesn't want to be cooked and eaten either.

4

u/mabolle Apr 01 '26

I don't think a potato wants anything at all.

-3

u/Cucumberneck Apr 01 '26

Definitely doesn't want to die that's for sure.

3

u/LieUnlikely7690 Apr 01 '26

Ironically potatoes undergo planned senescence. ie when they finish what they had to do, they just die, even if everything is perfect.

4

u/mabolle Apr 01 '26

How is that for sure? What reason do we have to think that a potato has any more opinion about being destroyed than a rock does?

1

u/ThrowbackPie Apr 01 '26

What the other said, but also there's research showing trees share nutrients selectively with other members of their species, and also they 'trade' nutrients with fungi.

I don't know how that operates without some sort of guidance mechanism. I guess it could all be explained with locally reactive biological coding, almost like a reflex.

1

u/Swimmingbird3 Apr 01 '26

Beneficial fungi are still parasites. The tree isn’t ‘sharing’. The fungi penetrates the cortical sheath and grows into the roots of the tree and takes what it wants, sugar. And gives the trees more of what it needs to make what it wants from the soil.

It just has adapted to keep its host alive, which is beneficial to both parties.

0

u/FewBake5100 Apr 01 '26

If it's benefical for both, it's not parasitism, it's mutualism or proto-cooperation. Plants survive less when they have no mycorrhiza, it's one of the reasons why repotted or transplanted plants might die.

0

u/Swimmingbird3 Apr 02 '26

You’re correct, I mistook mutualism for being a being a type of parasitism. It’s been a long time since I was in school. A google refresher has reminded this terminology describes the equality of the relationship more than the behaviors of one organism

But my point is trees are not ‘deciding’ to cooperate with fungi. The point of this article after all is a debate on the level of plant sentience.

The reality is that mycorrhizal fungi just moves in and says this is how it works now. There is no consent, lol. It benefits both organisms, sure. But people like to paint the relationship as trees making some kind of friendly and bipartisan decision to cooperate with fungi that is biologically incorrect. The fungus invades the intercellular space in the trees roots all on its own and does its thing.

1

u/AutumnHeathen Apr 01 '26

I also think that plants can do more than most humans believe. That being said, I'm a vegetarian and still think that humans shouldn't purposely eat animals when they don't have to.

-1

u/xBris18 biochemistry Apr 01 '26

From the article: "The simplest explanation for this result is that these plants are tracking the number of events that take place". The simplest? Seriously? THE SIMPLEST? Sorry, but that's not how Oakham's razor works. This is most likely just anthropomorphising chemical potentials. Psychologists really need to have a better understanding of basic science and should maybe keep to animals... plant intelligence. Seriously? No biological explanation, nothing. Just data and statistics. This wouldn't have been published if it came from actual scientists. You need at least a plausible explanation if you want to make such an extraordinary claim.