Plant Personality- Do plants really have feelings?

The Rainy Hour - News - Plant Personalities

Does the concept of plant personalities really exist? The very idea of plant intelligence may be controversial, but some believe that plants have learned to respond to their surroundings in the same way as animals, possessing their own personalities and giving to the debate whether animals possess personality and emotions.

Can a prickly cactus show different emotions than a woody sagebrush with family dependency, a glamorous orchid who is also a bit of a jerk, or an Aloe Vera with serious trust issues?

The idea seems absurd, or controversial at least, and many scientists refuse to contemplate the theory. Then there is Rick Karban.

A professor at the University of California at Davis, Karban is among the foremost researchers of plant signaling and communication. You may have heard of horse whisperers, but Karban’s ears are tuned into even subtler signals. He listens to sagebrush plants and tries to decipher what they are saying. Remarkably, he believes he has found the first steps to understanding their language.

The idea isn’t new. In 1983, two studies demonstrated that willow trees, poplars and sugar maples could warn each other about insect attacks. Undamaged trees would respond by releasing insect-repelling chemicals to ward off any incoming attacks. In short, the trees knew what their neighbors were experiencing and reacted to it. Mindless as trees could be, they could send, receive and interpret messages depending on their environment.

Scientists were quick to debunk the studies as inaccurate or flawed, but Karban has found that over forty other plants detect signals and release chemicals to defend themselves when they are under attack.

Plants, he has found, are incredibly sensitive. They can detect subtle touches, their relationship with other plants. They even know when they are in the shade and act upon it. They can manipulate predators when they need to, can rearrange their bodies to avoid competing with siblings and can perform molecular arithmetic at night to ensure that they have enough starch until the break of dawn.

Karban’s interest focused on how these plants communicate with each other and the differences that arise between them. When sagebrush release a chemical to warn of the presence of predators, plants react differently. The sagebrush is more responsive to cues that come from a relative. How a plant reacts also differs. The wild tobacco, for example, actually summons predators to eat caterpillars. But communication is only one of the traits that fascinate Korban. He is ready to take his studies one step further and prove that plants, like animals, also have personalities.

Plant Individuality instead of part of a Mean number

Plants are seen as replicants. Their individual traits do not matter, and only the average traits of a population are noteworthy. More than a special trait, an individual variation of a species is usually considered noise.

When researching personality, however, this noise is also considered as valuable behavior that goes beyond conventional botany’s limited perspective of means and medians. While we are only just entering the scope of researching plant behavior, Karban’s investigations can transform how scientists view plants.

For Karban, plants can often act in similar ways to humans. This reality is further enhanced when we look at the behavioral traits of some people during the Covid-19 pandemic.

“If you have a variation in how anal people are about washing their hands, you might have some individuals who are hyper hygienic” Karban explains, “Under certain conditions, they might have an advantage over individuals who are really cavalier. Under other kinds of conditions, being that person would be selected against”

Excessive hygienic traits can be considered an advantage under conditions like the current pandemic, but without the pandemic, people who are overly obsessed with hygiene are also associated with certain psychological disorders and allergies.

It is therefore important to know how responses arise in different environments and contexts. People need to respond to the sum of all the parts conditioning what surrounds them and act accordingly. The same applies to plants and animals.

How much of this adaptation to the environment is simple genetical self-defense and how much can be considered specific personalities is what interests Karban the most. After all, delving into possible plant personalities can help understand how certain plants survive pest infestations better than others and may provide insights into how climate change can disrupt the plant kingdom.

How nature Reacts differently to threats

One of the first plant behaviors that caught Karban’s attention when he began his research as a young scientist was when he discovered calluses growing on some trees. Cicadas normally lay their eggs in these trees, and when the larvae hatch, they drop to the ground, burrow into the tree's roots and spend 17 years sucking the sap before coming out of the ground.

The trees had responded to this threat, by growing calluses to try to crush the eggs before they could hatch.

Animals communicate with each other to warn of incoming threats. So too do plants. But this is where a variation in distress responses can be conditioned by an unlikely element: personality.

Scientist Caroline Couchoux is as passionate about chipmunks as Karban is about plants. Yet they both found similarities in one of their studies. Couchoux studies the distress calls that chipmunks make in different situations. She discovered that not only do noises differ depending on what is going on, but certain chipmunks are more reactive or prone to distress than others.

However, meeker chipmunks that tend to make distress calls over petty things are more likely to be ignored by their fellow group members. "Some guys would eating seeds, and a leaf falls on the ground. They panic and they make a call," Couchoux explains, "some guys just keep foraging."

These more reactive chipmunks are not doomed on an evolutionary level. Their meekness pays dividends as their excessively cautious behavior can prevent them from being eaten by predators, even if it also means they procreate less, they make up for the loss by generally living longer. More risk-prone chipmunks may die sooner but have more chances of mating during their shorter life-span. In the end, there is a balance within a group of different characteristics.

The same complexity can be applied to plant ecosystems. Individual variations in plant behavior are still difficult to comprehend, but understanding that not all plants are the same - and how they are different from each other- can help researchers analyze distinctive behaviors that can help - for example- in the development of more resilient crops.

Plant personalities require the need to respect individuality

Even if plant personality becomes more acknowledged within the scientific community, respecting this individuality can still be a major challenge. The effects of the Irish potato famine in the mid-19th century was only one of the indicators of imposing monocultures on a gran agricultural scale. However, modern agriculture also promotes the growth of food in vast, undifferentiated fields. Yet wild populations need variations to survive.

Further research would be fruitful in determining the scope of plant personality, and perhaps could develop systems for measuring it and finding patterns in judgement and decision-making.

Plants can weigh the costs and benefits of the actions that they make, for example, by making themselves chemically unattractive or summoning other predators that will eat whatever is eating them. They may not weep, but they know they are being eaten, in the same way that they are very aware of their environment. They are sensitive to acoustics, to temperature and light. To call them conscious would be farfetched, but to call them aware, responsive and individual would probably not. If measured further, who knows what advances we may find in the field.