The avatar opening its eyes at the end of the video implies that it has always had eyes and just kept them shut. I find this slightly unsettling for some reason.
Fun fact: there is a derived measurement you can calculate from satellite images called NDVI that really good at distinguishing plants from other objects. NDVI is essentially the difference between near-infrared and red normalized by how bright the total is. (far-red and near-infrared is kind of similar) So this is utilizing the same signature "colour" of plant leaves as mentioned in the video.
This was my reaction exactly. I was just pouring over a bunch of NDVI metrics and it's wild to think that plants came up with it first. Nature is amazing. Still waiting for us to engineer something that nature hasn't already come up with 😅
I remember hearing once that if you were to paint your walls a different color, any plants you have will take notice. And to me that made sense. Plants depend on light to survive, as we all know, and can even reposition themselves depending on what direction light is coming from, so it makes sense that they’re able to detect differences between light and dark. But for them to have actual color vision is truly extraordinary
I felt that plants were aware of their surroundings and intentionally react to them! I just didn’t know how complicated their awareness could be, so cool!
2 things 1. That visual of a tree with a bunch of eyes GAGGED me. New sleep paralysis demon unlocked. 2. It both comforts and terrifies me that the trees are territorial too.
Not gonna lie, a psychic-Grass type combination is lit! Also, the media tends to overglaze how plants can feel like us, even though their kind of perception of senses would've been very different. It has the same function, but different perception than animals.
All plants and animals, etc… in an ecosystem will balance each other through competition, but at the same time work together to keep things moving forward, make collective decisions, and protect each other. I think that is beautiful.
@@CharlieQuartz The photoreceptors will be absorbing some of that light, but a much larger portion is reflected. Plants reflect a huge amount of infrared light. So much so that they appear bright white in infrared cameras. Also just to note, the entire topic of the video is centered around plants seeing other plants. Plants MUST reflect a large portion of that far-red light in order for other plants to then receive it. It's not a reflect all vs absorb all kind of situation.
@@MGSLurmey I completely agree with everything after your first sentence, but I might be a little nit picker with my question that having photoreceptors explains why plants glow in infrared. I can totally accept that separate mechanisms in the plant tissue absorb and reflect infrared light, but I’m asking if having photoreceptors only makes them do both. Your first sentence indicates that but asfaik the wavelength a chemical or structure absorbs at will mostly not be the same as what it emits at. I suppose photoreceptors could, but that’s the specific I’m asking if there’s an explanation for.
@@WhoAmIdotIn they release hugh pitch sounds when under stress, which can be caused by trimming or gathering fruits and leaves. They send messages through the mycelium network to other plants to signal them they are being cut or burned. They have an alien way of communicating among themselves.
@@jgr7487 they also scream out for help whenever you mow the lawn. The smell is the grass releasing a distress signal to wasps and their relatives so that they can eat whatever insect is eating them.
I work in a plant light research lab and we’re taking some high school summer interns this year. I will use this video to introduce them to the topic - thanks!
I've always wondered this! I remember learning about photosynthesis when I was younger and asking if trees can tell where things are but being told they couldn't. To be fair I was at an age where day of thr triffids was more my speed for what I wanted those trees doing...but still.
Wow, I knew that trees could avoid/outgrow eachother but it never occured to me they could SEE eachother and that is the reason they do so, it both fascinates and terrifies me. Thanks!
Never thought that plants can sense light, but of course they can, they grow towards the direction of the sun! They must have some kind of photoreceptors, but the fact that they differentiate color to choose what they do next is still amazing
Plants are more and more like animals the more we know about them. I wouldn't be surprised, since they're affected by anesthetic gas like animals, they have a different type of consciousness of their surrounding. The question is, do they have a form of emotions?
I have read/seen something about plants having some kind of intelligence. Though I don’t remember much of about it. I haven’t heard of the anesthetic gas part before though. Would you have any recommendations for looking into it?
Completely agree, we tend to think of them as inferior to animals, but plants are able to form and recall memories, as well as problem solve and communicate , which shows a certain level of consciousness
reminds me that far red and red light are also used for day/night classification for plants which flower at different times iirc it was two chemicals that change in form when they are exposed to the types of light i.e. Fr -(far red)-> Fr2, Fr2 -(red)-> Fr R-(Red)-> R2, R2 -(Far Red)->R or something like that
Oh, this could also have some exploratory power when thinking about the evolutionary pressure for some plants to have the mutation that makes its leaves not green, most often red.
It was one of those things that came out of the homocentric era with other junk like the goldfish's 5 second memory and the whole alphadog thing. Very bad people looked to science to justify their terrible views and bent the data to confirm their beliefs, which ran rampant and unopposed until people started noticing what was going on with the Eugenicists. They were saying and doing the quiet part out loud and really revealing just how much bad-faith pseudoscience nonsense was infecting the field. If you want to see an example of a field where this went more-or-less unchecked, look no further than Psychology, where one of its key members is a notorious propagandist for some very terrible views and who spouts nonsense so incoherent (chaos dragon) and factually vapid it's a wonder how he managed to get (and hold on to for so long) his license in the first place.
Fun fact, the same colour effects are used in forest surveys - false colour infrared photography can be used to light up vegetation. If you've ever seen photos with a wild red hue on the plants there's a pretty good chance they're either taken with, or at least based on the aesthetic popularised by, aerochrome, a film used for this purpose back before digital took over
something I've wanted for a long is a camera that can colorshift, so that i can colorshift up/down to see colors i couldn't before, such as infared and ultraviolet
I remember finding your videos when I was younger specifically the hyena ones since those were my favorite animal at the time using the information I got from you pr videos I made a presentation about the hyena for a contest my library was doing I got third place today you randomly came up on my for you and im glad you did
Honestly, now I'm just curious about the subjective experience of plants. I imagine their "sight" must be like when you're outside on a sunny day and a cloud drifted over the sun. Even if you had your eyes closed, you'd be able to feel the change in light on your skin.
They reflect far-red, not absorb it. Similar experience to us would be a murmur slowly turned into crescendo (as more or bigger plant would reflect more far red). At which point you'll either need to move to find calmer space, or scream "THIS HERE IS MY PLACE!" and hope they are the one that will move away.
Plants are just really slow animals. They can’t move around much, but they can evolve pretty quick. I hope the plant based archeologists of the far future will be kind to our memory.
we often think of plants as simple and primitive, because they don't do the things we animals do, like move or bite or shout, but they've been around far longer than us and have evolved just as much as we have. certainly, if they could think, they might regard us as lousy freeloaders, unwilling to commit to the long-haul of settling in one spot forever, and taking food from them in simple metabolic processes.
I think this is saying that they react to this one range of frequencies in one way, and, implicitly, that they react to other frequencies in other ways? Another comment said that some use ratios of some frequencies to help estimate the season??
@@drdca8263 Then it would make sense. Also if they have a "photosynthesis" sensor and a far red sensor then the two can be combined to some form of "color vision". And you can take the ratio of the two to possibly get some information out of it.
There's a substantial difference between having "vision" and acting as though you have vision and behaving accordingly. You could create a simple machine that behaves according to the colour of light it receives. That doesn't mean it has "colour vision" unless you're a Functionalist about consciousness.
Boquila trifoliolata is able to imitate the form of the leaves of their host plant. Supossedly even when the host is a plastic plant. So this could be how they "see" the leaves form.
Of course, without lenses or similar focusing mechanism, I doubt that the sense of "color" that plants have would actually be useful for "seeing" any kind of detail that animals like humans might expect. Everything would kinda blur together, and the plant would only be able to sense that there is more of one color or another.
Maybe, but at least one plant, Boquila trifoliolata, seems to copy it's surrounding host plants purely by sight. Up to and including fake plastic plants, which are clearly not giving off any other chemical or bio signatures for them to copy.
I just wonder how vision and forming images they can produce can work. Imagine if they were as sentient as we can, that would be crazy to try to place yourself in.
They can't form images at all. It's more like some cells get a signal from 0 to 1 which then influences mechanical processes talked about in the video. It would be crazy if plants were sentient, but they aren't. There is no evidence of any plant sentience whatsoever.
Given how much _green_ light bounces off a leaf which won't bounce off of something like say.... a dead branch being munched on by bacteria, if I was designing a plant to respond to competitors arrive, I would have chosen a photoreceptor that responds to green light instead of far red. Likewise if I was designing eyes for primates, I'd have put the photoreceptor cells above the ganglion cells not vice versa. Then again, what the plants have do work and we clearly can see so our eyes do work.
1:01 I wonder if there is any evolutionary advantage to reflecting far red light. It seems to be a disadvantage of alerting future competitors of their presence.
plsease tell me this is a reason why sunflowers turn to the sun because i had an argument and was the opinion that plants in fact can see as how else would sunflowers turn to the light
i wonder if i can use this for my chili peppers. tricking them into flowering earlier might leave them smaller but might produce a larger yield over the year as a whole... i think next season i will start experimenting with some far red reflectors. thanks for this neat piece of information!
