A new study says plants can both hear and produce sounds. The future looks ominous

Personally I’ve always wondered if a plant winces or screams when I shear off leaves (say of the English basil for a salad), or rip out a carrot or stalk of celery by its roots, or what the garden hedge feels like while it is being sheared by the gardeners. What does a vivid emerald green head of broccoli feel like when it is plunged into a bowl of slightly salted boiling water? And what dignity is left for a magnificent neem tree whose branches have been hacked just so we can get a little more sun in winter?

You just need to cut a fresh green stalk of any plant and you will see its juices (or sap) bleed and run. Cut your finger with a blade and you will bleed and feel it all right and you will shout and scream, if not faint!

And if we go macro on this, can you imagine what a field of fresh green vegetables or flowers – like say spinach and sunflowers – must be experiencing when it is being harvested? Or, a wheat-field as it watches or senses a harvester roar up inexorably towards it? Or, the trees in a rainforest as they listen to the high-pitched keening of power saws heading their way and hear the thunderous crash as their great 500 year-old parents or grandparents fall and shake the ground. Alas, they can’t uproot and run!

Bichhu-booti leaf (Credit: Ranjit Lal)

The writing seems to be on the wall: a recent report has yet again held that plants can not only hear but produce sounds, which we (fortunately or unfortunately) can’t hear. It’s not going to be long before scientists tell us that not only can plants produce sounds but they also may scream in agony and fear when being threatened and butchered. Plants can and do defend themselves from predators, such as goats and caterpillars, by producing bitter poisons in their leaves (tannin is one such) and arming themselves with thorns and prickles. But these are poor defences against us with our power saws and defoliants.

Conversely, it is also being claimed that plants can sense the presence and buzz of bees (and birds) around them and will produce sweeter nectar when they are about, some even carefully rationing the amount of nectar available to each, so as to improve their chances of pollination.

At the moment, we (and our consciences) are safe: we can’t hear them, so we can claim all innocence. What I fear is going to happen is this: some smart geek is going to do some jiggery-pokery and develop smartphones that not only will be able to record the sounds plants make while being slaughtered but play them back to us at frequencies we can tune into. (Remember just 40 years ago the waitlist for an ordinary crackly landline connection was 10 years, and see where we are now!) This is going to cause a lot of people (especially vegans and vegetarians), to immediately head for major counselling and guilt management therapy. As it is, the sound of an axe biting into wood makes one sick to the stomach.

But fear not! We are a resilient species and we know that nature can be cruel: eat or be eaten is the golden rule after all and all of us abide by it.

And ironically (and I’m being realistically cynical), it could be our smartphones that will help us retain our sanity as we devour a bowl of salad or hack at the branches of a tree or boil a head of broccoli until it is mush. Just as we all gather around a gruesome accident site with our smart-phones held up, video-recording away instead of helping an accident survivor in the hope our reel will go viral and get us a gazillion ‘likes’, we’ll do the same when we crunch into a fresh cucumber, or boil alive spinach leaves. Yes, social media will go just berserk over the great green scream.