Tomato and tobacco plants make distinctive sounds when cut or dehydrated, a new study has found.
Those sounds change depending on the plant emitting them and the type and severity of the threat that prompts them, according to the study in Cell.
The findings shatter the common perception of plants as silent, passive background players to the animal life in their environments.
Instead, they show those plants could send out signals that animals in their environment can hear and pick up on — and potentially use to change their behavior.
Tomatoes left without water begin making noise “on the second day — even while the tomato still looks good,” Lilach Hadany, a Tel Aviv University mathematician who co-authored the study, told The Hill.
The sounds, which somewhat resembled the noise of popcorn popping, peaked after five days of water stress, and then began to decline as the plant dried out.
The sounds happen at the approximate volume of human speech but outside the range of our hearing, the study found.
