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December 7, 2019 07:00 am

Recordings Reveal That Plants Make Ultrasonic Squeals When Stressed

Researchers have discovered that plants make airborne sounds when stressed, which they say "could open up a new field of precision agriculture where farmers listen for water-starved crops," reports New Scientist. From the report: Itzhak Khait and his colleagues at Tel Aviv University in Israel found that tomato and tobacco plants made sounds at frequencies humans cannot hear when stressed by a lack of water or when their stem is cut. Microphones placed 10 centimeters from the plants picked up sounds in the ultrasonic range of 20 to 100 kilohertz, which the team says insects and some mammals would be capable of hearing and responding to from as far as 5 meters away. A moth may decide against laying eggs on a plant that sounds water-stressed, the researchers suggest. Plants could even hear that other plants are short of water and react accordingly, they speculate. On average, drought-stressed tomato plants made 35 sounds an hour, while tobacco plants made 11. When plant stems were cut, tomato plants made an average of 25 sounds in the following hour, and tobacco plants 15. Unstressed plants produced fewer than one sound per hour, on average. It is even possible to distinguish between the sounds to know what the stress is. The researchers trained a machine-learning model to discriminate between the plants' sounds and the wind, rain and other noises of the greenhouse, correctly identifying in most cases whether the stress was caused by dryness or a cut, based on the sound's intensity and frequency. Water-hungry tobacco appears to make louder sounds than cut tobacco, for example. The study, which has not yet been published in a journal, can be found here.

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