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We might have taken a few digs at the vegans this week, but surely we are allowed to rub this one in just a little.

It turns out that plants that are in distress make clicking sounds that even animals can hear from more than 4 metres away. And now for the first time, scientists have attuned these sounds to fall within the frequency at which humans hear.

Scientists have revealed that plants produce pops and clicks when placed under harmful pressures such as injuries and dehydration. These ‘cries’ are in the form of ultrasonic noises that may be audible to animals and plants as far as 4 metres away.

Our veggie friends use these ultrasonic sounds to communicate with other plants in their ecosystems. The research into this has been heralded as a breakthrough in understanding the mysterious world of fauna as well as possibly mitigating agricultural challenges brought on by climate change.

Plants have devised many ways to interact with their fellow creatures that humans can appreciate, such as complex fragrances, visual splendor, spiky surfaces, and tasty treats like fruits and nuts. However, they are not especially famous for being noisy.

Scientists have previously recorded plant ‘sounds’ by placing devices directly onto plants, but at the time it was unclear whether these noises travelled to other species, thereby conveying messages about their condition.

Researchers led by Itzhak Khait, a plant scientist at Tel Aviv University, have recorded tobacco and tomato plants releasing high-frequency noises that are detectable to other plants. The noises the plants made were so specific that it allowed them to create a machine-learning tool that could decipher whether the plants were damaged, thirsty or part of a larger group.

The results “can alter the way we think about the plant kingdom, which has been considered to be almost silent until now.”

Vice reports that Lilach Hadany, an evolutionary biologist at Tel Aviv University, and her team expected sounds to emanate from plants, but were surprised to learn that these sounds acted as ‘communication’, by delivering specific ‘messages’.

“Previous research has suggested that plants can emit acoustic vibrations by forming and collapsing air bubbles in their vascular system as part of a process called cavitation.” For the purposes of the experiment, Hadany and her colleagues stressed out the plants by dehydrating them and damaging the stems. What they found was a complex ‘language’ that included nearly 50 ‘sounds’ per minute.

Their machine learning tool identified specific sounds relating to these tests and in a silent acoustic chamber was able to identify specific issues with a plant by just listening to their lament.

By training machine learning models, we were able to distinguish between drought-stressed, cut, and control plants, based only on the sounds they emit.”

“Plant sound emissions could offer a way for monitoring crops water and possibly disease states—questions of crucial importance in agriculture,” the team of plant torturers said.

The possibility of strengthening a plant’s own resistance to drought could be enhanced by playing sounds associated with dehydration. This could enable plants to adapt to dry climates more quickly.

This does not necessarily mean that your kale salad is going to kak you out for eating it, but it may help us understand our chlorophyllic cousins. So for now, just mutter a ‘sorry’ when you bite down on baby tomatoes, otherwise, it’s going to snitch on you.

And as we all know, snitches get salad dressing.

[source:vice]