Scientists have discovered that plants "talk" to other plants through nanomechanical vibrations to help each other grow, says a report in Science Daily.
BioMed Central's open access journal BMC Ecology has published a research which shows that plants having a friendly chat with neighboring plants improves seed germination. It has been found that chilli seeds grow better when they are grown with basil leaves. This shows that even in the absence of other means of communication like chemical and light-mediated signals and contact, plants still communicate with each other through nanomechanical vibrations.
For the study, Monica Gagliano and Michael Renton from the University of Western Australia grew a group of chilli seeds alone and another group of the same seeds with basil. It was found that seed germination was very slow among the group of seeds that were planted alone while the chilli seeds that were planted with basil grew rapidly.
For the second part of the study, the chilli seeds that were grown with basil were separated from basil with a black plastic. However, Gagliano and Renton noticed that it seemed that the plants could still communicate with each other. A partial response was seen for fully grown chilli plants blocked from known communication with the seeds.
"Our results show that plants are able to positively influence growth of seeds by some as yet unknown mechanism," Dr Gagliano said. "Bad neighbors, such as fennel, prevent chilli seed germination in the same way. We believe that the answer may involve acoustic signals generated using nanomechanical oscillations from inside the cell which allow rapid communication between nearby plants."
