I’m a big botany nerd, so in good conscience I feel compelled to share this information with SciShow and viewers! As it turns out, the wonderful Gros Michel banana, is not technically extinct. There are a couple of fields where these bananas still grow on one carribean island, isolated and protected from panama disease! Perhaps one day we’ll be able to enjoy this variety again!
If you’ve been in other parts of the world than the US, you can find non-Cavendish bananas. I’ve had some in New Zealand, they were called finger bananas because they were tiny. They were super tasty too.
@@iriandia There’s some of these types of fingerling bananas in Asian markets in the US with a wide amount of produce c: in Filipino and Thai stores these are usually available - if you’re looking for a supermarket type of store that carries it, a Filipino supermarket chain in the US called Seafood City also carries these bananas along with other varieties
Hank may have missed one cool thing that some plants do. My Calathea Ornata and Maranta Leuconeura (prayer plant) both fold their leaves up at night and fold them down during the day. Thing is that when I brought them home they did not do this to the light. They would sometimes remain in their night position during day and day position at night. Over time, they would fold up and down with the light. The cool thing about this is, that if I sleep in and am late turning on their grow light, I will find them folded into the day position despite the fact that it is pitch black. They will also fold into their sleep position at night even if I forget to turn out their light. In other words, they fold their leaves up and down by their circadian rhythm, not the light they are being exposed to. The light merely set the rhythm over time, just like in humans. When I first brought them home, they were folding incorrectly do to suffering circadian dysrhythmia (jet lag).
Yea I kinda remember a SciShow video talking about plants having circadian rhythm, but maybe that was in one of the many plant documentaries I've seen... Anyway; yea I've noticed the same thing with my oxalis triangularis 😊 (And my mimosa pudica before it died due to my being unable to water it for a bit bc hospital... RIP little guy. You were super cool...)
@@blessed885 you're right, I am at err, when @25:08 she said, "It's okay, if nothing else, they're not counting how many days you've forgot to water them" I have made corrections in my original entry. And, some of the plants I have now are STILL a bit more with it than some of my past roommates.
Re: moving plants (knowing what time it is) I’m a massive plant nerd and have over 40 plants. Many of them are in the Marantaceae family (arrowroots) one thing every plant in this family has in common is the ability to close their leaves at night. The most common is the maranta leuconeura, also known as prayer plant. They have this name because the leaves look like praying hands at night. Marantas are my favorite plants, they’re gosh darn awesome.
I think indoor plants provide more psychological benefits than physical benefits. Having the green plants makes you feel like your living spaces are more open than what they are.
Um... how do I say this nicely? Andrew, it's proven they provide physical benefits. What you think is irrelevant to what's accurate and true. What you _should_ think is that those who study these things and have written dozens and dozens of peer-reviewed papers on the subject likely know loads more about the subject than you do. THAT is what you *should* think. I sincerely hope you've learned a little more, and gotten off of the Dunning-Krueger Top Left Mountain since you wrote this absurd commentary.
@@MaryAnnNytowl Psychological effects can provide physical benefits. For example, if the plants help reduce your stress levels then you will see a huge range of physical health benefits like reduced blood pressure, improved immune system function and so on.
@@MaryAnnNytowl Wow, that's some arrogance. I haven't seen this much audacity in years, it feels like. One, as they pointed out themselves, purely psychological stimuli can cause physical responses. Have you heard of the placebo effect? Happens with more than just pills. Two, while someone who hasn't done studies/etc shouldn't set themselves as an expert (which OP didn't), people are allowed to hypothesize! It's almost like that's an entire step in the scientific method!
There's also a particular species of flower that only opens up when it "hears" the particular frequency made by the buzzing of a specific species of bee! (Before anyone asks for a source: I saw it in a David Attenborough/BBC documentary; Kingdom of Plants.... Not something I can easily link. But it's a great watch! I highly recommend it!!)
The key words in there are "the way that we do" They don't have anything we recognize as a brain, but then again we didn't recognize the Octopus brain at first either. I mean, 9 brains is kind of out of the ordinary. So it is possible we just haven't "found" it yet. We've barely scratched the surface when it comes to learning how plants work.
*Walking down the street* "Hey charly, sup Cathrine. Looking good Barbara." *All the people sitting at there doors looking at me strange cause none of them own these names* - Me - Im talking to the plants! What?!
Ok but like............ I do actually pay attention to the plants around me, I am actually familiar with all the different plants around my home. Cept I don't give em names like that, more like... "Maple tree, red oak, ash tree, red eye susans, box wood hedges, hosta, hosta, hosta, hosta, hosta..." Lol (Hostas are over used in landscaping in case you didn't get the joke)
I'd say that if you don't know how to take care of plants fully it can make your indoor air quality worse, because plants in poor health attract things like mold especially if the plants are overwatered. I say this as someone who loves plants and literally is studying ornamental horticulture... and as someone with ADHD who struggles with motivation and remembering to do things, who has had those problems with my houseplants myself lol
try hydroponics :) Lots of systems available that look great & need little care (kratky hydroponics is a good starting point) or worst case scenario, tissue culture is pretty invincible! Won't impact air quality in the slightest, but I've given numerous tissue culture plants to black thumbed friends so they can't kill the plant :) I add dye to the gel, in a pretty, ornamental bottle & seal it up nice & tight so the friend can't be tempted to open it. A friend with mental health issues & constantly in & out of hospital LOVES his little sundew that he is allowed to take into the hospital with him, despite their ban on potted plants for hygiene reasons. He just sits & looks at it when he's feeling depressed & it lives no matter how little light or care it gets :)
@@rdrpro69 TOTALLY! Do you have a favourite? For bug control, I can't remember the name of my favourites right not, but the largish ones that genuinely catch the drain flies, they're awesome :) but my total favourite is little Burmannii :) I've been in love with it ever since growing from seed & thinking it was dying, due to the black spot on all of them, when they were so small they were barely visible to the naked eye, only to discover under a 10x magnifier that the black spot was it's dinner lol I love how ruthless it was at such TINY size :) can't believe how many bugs they caught at only days old!
The thing that got me was that they were exclusively focused on VOCs, and not one mention of oxygen/carbon dioxide concentrations. Houses are well known to have much higher concentrations of CO2, which, yeah, has a negative effect on cognition, and could give a 'stuffy' feeling.
@@stevenn1940 I have a feeling you'd still need a good number of plants to make that noticable a difference in CO2 levels (or possibly an algae tank), but I'll admit I'm going based on my gut here. Probably not nearly as much as you'd need for VOCs but I'd wager a guess that it's a bit more than is convenient for most people
NYT science writer Natalie Angier has written quite a bit about the behavior of plants. She brings up the question of whether plants are sentient or not.That work is worth a look. One of my favorite movies is "The Day of the Triffids"(1962)with man-eating mobile plants.
I'm guessing the way plants can "count", at least the trapdoor ones is that when their hairs get triggered, they a partial activation sequence is started. This activation sequence may take varying numbers of triggers and strengths of triggers to fully activate, thus giving the appearance of counting. I could imagine the same mechanism may control the varying amounts of digestive enzymes released. If these partial activation sequences had a reset mechanism, they could also look like they are time relative too.
This comment reminded me of a real video about bramble control for sheep farms in Australia. The thumbnail showed the entangled sheep and had a clickbait-y title like "Meat-eating plants of Australia" but this was an entirely serious video on the importance of blackberry management from a commercial perspective.
I know the trees in my neighborhood better than the ppl. Im also terrible at giving directions bc I navigate by the natural markers made by plants and trees....and I tend to forget others dont do that. For example when giving directions to my house, I told a friend to pass the clear cut trees on the right side of the highway, and when she saw the crape myrtle with red buds on it, it would be the next left about 2 minutes past the house with the pine that had been struck by lightening lol
I bought a Mass Cane back around May 2020. It hasn't died on me yet, so I'm doing something right. And the green it provides me in the winter is nice when the outside is just snow and a tree waiting for spring.
Thank you all very much at SciShow for creating this. I like the way you framed things initially by showing that we humans are for more likely to notice and interact with other animals than we are with plants. Your title even implies that as a culture (Western Science based) we don't give plants the attention and valuation they deserve. A term for this phenomenon is "plant blindness" and ,in short, it leads to great misunderstandings and underestimations of the environmental value of plants. This bias extends to the amount of research and research funding compared to studies on humans first and then a sliding scale of animals. Generally the more distantly related, or this appearing to be the case, to humans the less resources are allocated to research them. I am a longtime plant nerd, and environmental educator, especially interested in the ecology/natural history of ancient forests of the Pacific Northwest (like Suzanne Simard) ,the places with the most complex CNM as they have the largest and oldest hub/mothers trees of numerous species connected by a myriad of fungi species. I am also drawn to ethnobotany in the broadest sense, that is all interactions between humans and plants. I find plant adaptations to fire and plant speciation and natural regional hybridization, and phytogeography (where plants grow and where they have grown in the past and how the have moved over time and why) fascinating too, I guess most things plants peak my interest and passion and this makes me quite unusual in my culture and I find that sad, sometimes kind of lonely, and also quite terrifying given the trajectory of the global environmental crisis and how impactful the loss of forests, especially ancient forests of all kinds, and the loss plant species and plant genetic diversity and so on... So Thanks again for given plants a little more light.
I tend to use the plants in peoples yards as landmarks when I walk. Quite a few nice ones actually, few people around here really care about their plants.
Some farmers think that briers are carnivorous due to their curved thorns. If you want to learn more, there's a farmer that raises sheep and he made a video about it. Quite fascinating.
Great compilation about one of my favorite subjects. I'm really surprised you've never covered the case of the Acacia trees in Africa using airborne chemical signals to each other to *collectively* conspire against overgrazing antelope... by poisoning them.
I am deeply confident that I couldn't possibly appreciate plants anymore than I already do. They are our amazing distant cousins in life on this planet and are just as if not more impressive than we animals are.
I thinks it cool that you thought about it. As someone who has been fascinated by plants for a very long time (especially ancient trees, the hub/mother trees in ancient forests) I lament the fact that people, especially in Western cultures, ignore, or at least greatly underestimate the true environmental impact of plants. They simply make life as we know it possible. We humans certainly would never have existed if our lineage had not evolved a world full of trees.
Can you still get the Gros michel cultivar in Malaysia?? I am old enough to remember what ‘ real’ bananas tasted like before the Cavendish replaced every commercially grown banana on the planet.
@@martyspencer1 Do you mean the really long one? Yeah, that one's pretty available. I see a bunch of them like twice every month. Although when compared to other local bananas, it's never as prevalent.
Hey ! I live in Malaysia too ! My grandfather and mum always buy the pisang emas instead of, well, the other varieties, like the rastali and the Cavendish. I rarely ever eat bananas though since my dumb butt for a sister usually finishes it along with the others in the family like my dad and my grandfather before I get the chance.
@@imgonnabefree our house usually get hotel variety, it's a small banana famous for being sweet and easy to eat. They are also common to use in banana cakes
I did the math, and with 1 plant =1m³ it was ~160 plants for my 800 ft² apartment. Then I googled the genus' and discovered that one of them is a prolific Ivy that makes a GREAT houseplant if you don't mind it climbing the walls and messing up the paint - which led me to ask what was the size fo the potted plant (grams, for instance?) that was in that 1m³ enclosure? Because they can get much bigger! This is actually somewhat doable! And if I only accomplish a fraction in my old, not "new with the latest materials" apartment... who wouldn't like cleaner air and more oxygen where they live?
Corn used to look like wheat, and wheat used to only have a few seeds, not dozens. Side note, chickens used to fly as the African red fowl. Another side note, you can audibly hear corn growing directly after rain, as the walls slide past each other.
I would love for Scishow to touch on studies out there concerning native plants and their importance to our carrying capacity for the entire world. "Bringing Nature Home" by Doug Tallamy got me started on full conversion to local plants only and the diversity of life in the shared space (our yard) has skyrocketed.
Thanks SciShow, for fighting the scourge of plant blindness. (For those interested in more flora facts, start with the Plant Consciousness playlist on my channel.)
you probably should re-order your playlist to put that one closer to the top. I doubt those not already converted will go to the trouble of finding it. Thanks though :) & in particular, you have a video in there that I had a link to but that was deleted from youtube, so nice to find again (In The Mind of Plants (Full Documentary on The Intelligence of Plants)). That & "what plants talk about" are my 2 favourite docos & resources on this topic. Seeing is believing :) btw you have that one replicated in your playlist as "Secret Language Of Plants National Geographic Documentary HD" There's a few more there I haven't seen yet & will be watching too, so thanks :)
& not sure if scishow really deserves a full thanks, they're pretty against the idea of plant brains, even though there's pretty dam clear evidence to support networked brain nodes in each root isn't there! We dumb humans just aren't smart enough to be able to figure out how their brains work yet, so we dismiss the idea, instead of recognising they're superior to us (the scishow? video on trees growing over 10 metres tall was a really good example of how plant anatomy is superior to our own, to the point that we just can't even make heads or tails out of it & so assume it doesn't even exist)
@@lilaclizard4504 I don’t think it’s fair or accurate to say that any being’s biology is “superior” to any other, only that they’re better adapted to certain things. A tree’s anatomy might be superior to ours for filtering the air, for example, but our anatomy is obviously superior for running a marathon lol.
@@MerkhVision true, but from an evolutionary perspective, they're superior, or at least have been around a LOT longer than us, so far more time to evolve & also outlived all animal species & in terms of running a marathon, is there actually an evolutionary point to doing that? Catching food maybe? but plants don't need to do that, they've found other ways. Reproduction & colonising new territory is the other reason to travel & plants actually outperform our marathon skills on that, being able to travel huge distances on the wind as newborn babies :)
Blue Sap I don’t like tomatoes (fruit), but the plants themselves are velvety soft and smell nice. I keep finding myself raising one each year and it’s usually an Indigo Rose tomato.
18:46 I’m wearing headphones as I’m watching this (so therefore no one else can hear the sound) and right at this part my brother looked over my shoulder and asked if I was watching a POV kpop video lol
I work at Walmart, and I help unload the truck at night. Every day, there is a pallet of just bananas that weighs over a ton. If you don't have a good jack, it's best to have someone pulling and someone pushing.
I’ve always been into animals and I’ve always liked plants but I never got into plants heavy until around five years ago when I got my first live planted aquarium💯🌱🐠💙🔥
When the plant closes the contact of the item and the amount of petals that meet seem to govern how much juices are secreted. I tested this with little inflating balls in my venus traps. So not only the hairs being triggered but also the petals contact. I am still compiling data.
How do you think a hollyhock would do at cleaning the air? I ask this laughing because I grabbed a small hollyhock and brought it in the evening before we had a hard freeze to come that night and just set it in my study window to do something with it until hubby can put it in the greenhouse tomorrow. Have you ever seen 4o'clock plants and flowers? They totally fold up at about 4:00 pm. It's amazing. My mother used to show this to me and I was always trying to see it happen (not sure if I ever did see it). I barely remember the gros michele bananna, I was a real little kid then but my husband and I lived in Puerto Rico where we always had access to several varieties of bananna. We now live in Tucson and go to an international supermarket monthly where we can get creme crackers and there are at least 5 varieties of bananna not including plantains (which I also buy there for tostones and mofongo and to cook as maduros). It's largely an asian market and we can also have a catfish caught from the tank and done- in, filleted and cooked there in the fish market area. I love the place.
Plants got the moving thing down a long time ago, they are just doing it to themselves we haven't caught up with it. For one thing we take moving for granted as humans.
Plants on telephone: Plant 1 : Hello, it's me ... Plant 2 : Sorry I can't talk to you I'm kinda busy. Plant 1 : I was wondering if you had time for me. Plant 2 : Stop calling Stop calling I don't wanna talk anymore. Plant 1 : Okay, Bye ... ( sobs ) I am sorry if this is a bad joke, I ain't good at em' .
They need a similar setup but with a much bigger or multiple test tuebes or underground space, being able to see them under ground is awesome. You could have and intricate under ground setup with a curtain around the area to make it dark when not viewing it.
When telling us the 4 best plants for cleaning the air it would have been nice if you gave the common name also and not just the scientific one, just a thought.
Common names aren't the same everywhere though. If you search Google or something for the scientific name then you'll be able to find the specific type they're talking about and be confident you've got the right one. :)
they move around as they grow, searching for something to hold & when they find something, the pressure on that side of their vine causes them to bend towards it & therefore wrap around it :)
Talking about your bit on auxin at 5:20. It isn't that the stem on one side is growing faster than the other side. Auxin flows to the shaded side of the stem and the presence of this auxin causes the cells on that side to elongate. The shaded side isn't growing; the cells themselves are stretching making the shoot bend toward the sun. It's called phototropism
Look at the structure of auxin and melatonin side by side on two screens. For even more fun, look at the structure of chlorophyll and the hemoglobin heme group on two screens. Remember one is for a plant and the other for animals. (I was a Forestry major at a land grant school. We know stuff.)
6:55 Haha, lucky me I have beans, pothos, ginger, tulips, an avocado tree, some bamboo, and random unidentified tiny embryonic leaf plants as well. All in one corner of the dining room between a window and a uv hanging light.
You lovely folks are pretty great about captioning your regular videos but...it would be really nice if your compilations were accessible too. Since there's new hosting and description in between the original videos which means we can't just go watch the original videos separately. :(
I wanted to get a few plants to clean the air to help with my allergies but I have a cat and I suck at gardening so I gave up on the idea. This video confirmed I made the right choice lol
Let’s hope the banana that they are developing has more banana flavor than what we have now. I’m 63, and I remember the sweet, fruity taste of the banana of old and believe me, it’s so different! I dream of the day a banana tastes like a banana again!
On that study showing trading of radioactive carbon between trees, I wonder how it was ruled them trading nutrients vs the tree dosed with radioactive carbon shedding the carbon through its leaves and the biodegredation of the leaves was what was absorbed by other trees...