We might dine on light if we had a great deal more surface area and were more transparent. And knew a bit more about chemistry.
We can walk and talk and make tall buildings. Plants have other abilities and it is unproductive to indulge in plant vs. animal comparisons. Oranges and apples? Easy. It is more like comparing the most exotic rock that has landed here from outer space to an orange or apple.
In addition to eating light, plants can have sex miles apart, regenerate perfectly after losing as much of 90 percent of their bodies and have perhaps 20 different senses. link Plants can sense gravity, moisture, light, pressure, and hardness, but can also sense volume, nitrogen, phosphorus, salt, various toxins, microbes, and chemical signals from neighboring plants. link Plants can smell and taste; they have been proven to respond to exposure to chemicals; they have a kind of ‘sight’ reacting to wavelengths of light and shadows; plants know “touch” and change behavior when encountering a solid object; and plants are affected by sound. Sound recognition in plants was touted by the much-maligned and somewhat debunked book, The Secret Life of Plants, published more than fifty years ago. link
But some of the claims made about plants in the 1970’s have been dusted off. Playing classical music for houseplants in now decidedly our of fashion but, the “hearing” of plants has been affirmed recently. Heidi Appel, a chemical ecologist at the University of Missouri, has discovered that plants marshal chemical defenses, not only when a caterpillar begins feeding on leaf, but when a recording of a caterpillar feeding on a leaf is played nearby. link
Stirring up chemical compounds is child’s play for plants. In researching whether plants communicate with each other, scientist Ted Farmer placed microelectrodes on plant leaves. He learned that plants use electrical signals to share information; under attack they alert their neighbors to the need for some chemical compound. link Unable to run, plants use a complex molecular vocabulary to “signal distress, deter or poison enemies, and recruit animals to perform various services for them.” link
All this chemistry. It reminds me of high school when my chemistry class wrecked my grade point average. It occurs to me plants are like the nerdiest nerds in high school; the one’s who think chemistry is cool. They don’t care about other ‘abilities”. No wonder any discussion of their communications gets on our nerves. No wonder scientists line up to disprove that plants can talk to each other–and if they do talk to each other, their words have little meaning.
But what if they are really the spoiled, rich kids. They have everything. They just don’t care what we think and they don’t care to talk to us. Perhaps they think we are beneath them.