April 17, 2012 • 21 mins
Do you speak the language of the carrots? From the screams of grass blades to the stink songs of carnivorous plants, the green kingdom is abuzz with the silent voices of plants. In this episode, Robert and Julie bend their ear to whispers in the leaves.
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Speaker 1 (00:03):
Welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind from how Stuff
Works dot com. Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind.
My name is Robert Lamb, and I'm Julie Douglas. Julie,
if you knew that you were going to be reincarnated,
and you were going to be reincarnated as a plant,
what plant would you choose? Yeah, beautiful blooms, nice thick leaves,
(00:28):
it's you know, it's hardy, ornamental, and yet it has substance.
Described this one to me? What does it look like?
You know? I mean sort of a plant with nice
glossy green leaves, so you know, the spade shaped right
and as I say, a beautiful pink blooms or red
or I don't know. It's something that I look out,
you know, from my window a lot. Just why it
(00:51):
came to mind so quickly, and you, um, I would
I would go with moss, some some some form of moss.
That's so gothic, that's so you it's not really gothic
like I think moss is a moss is very happy
type of plant. I mean plant. I don't know. I
can't think of a god. Plants are very god for
the most Actually, there are golf gardens, and they're beautiful.
(01:12):
I'm not kidding there these deep purple's. Um. Yeah, you
should go online and look up golf gardens. Okay, so
they're just like a lot of dark purple plants and
things of that nature. Yeah, Moss. I think of moss
is rich and vibrant, growing in the depths of woods
where never a goth has tread so um, you know,
and just living peacefully far from everything, and just you know,
(01:34):
soft and moist aesthetic about it. I will say that
monk like about moss. Yeah, yeah, yeah, you're right, not
just trying to just living there hanging out moss. Yeah,
you know, for taking it easy in the next life
as a plant. But that's one of the things we're
really going to discuss in our podcast today. Plants really
have this stereotype. It's easier to dismiss plants as being
(01:58):
this passive not even really an organism. You just think
of like plants as stuff that grows elsewhere in the
world that I have to cut back in order to
see across my lawn, that has to be maintained to
a certain degree, but otherwise isn't really a player on
the planet. Yeah, I mean especially when you think about
invasive types of plants like kudzu in the South when
(02:19):
it was introduced, just took over everything. So if you're
driving along the highway, you'll see kudzoo covered buildings. It's
just pretty monstrous looking, and so you look at it
more like, oh, man, that's such a past I gotta
I need to maintain this. But but even then, we
just think of it as this some morphous force that's
sort of coming at us. It's it's it's easy to
dismiss it and not think of it as something that
(02:40):
is actually highly sensitive bunch of organisms. I mean, yeah, yeah,
there's a secret life to plants. Yeah, and they're actively
competing for environmental resources both above the ground and below
the ground. They're assessing their surroundings and they're estimating how
much energy they need to expand granted, all of this
is taking place at a much slower pace than with
us and mols, but it's happening. And one of the
(03:01):
key things that we're gonna look at today is communication.
Ye specifically whether or not plants actually have a language
in the form of chemical compounds. Language what you say,
but wait until you hear from the stuff that we're
about to lay on you. We're specifically talking about chemical communication.
You see this in between plants, so inside plants, but
also between other plants. In fact, there are more than
(03:22):
twenty different groups of molecules related to communication in plants
that we've identified. Those are groups, So for instance, they're
up to one hundred thousand different substances that are actively
used for communication in the root zone of plants alone.
You have things like mechanical contact that are responsible for
setting off some of this communication. For instance, you'll have
(03:42):
a plant that reacts to an animal is trying to
eat it, or something touches it and discards pollen, so
that whatever's touching it will carry that pollen elsewhere, or
it is growing in such a way as to intersect
with a beam of sunlight is coming into the canopy above.
And you see these interactions between plants and other plants,
between plants and other species, other families, even the whole
(04:04):
other kingdoms. And most of these are symbiotic or parasitic relationships,
but but they exist. They're not again, they are not
passive members of the environment. They're active members of the environment. Yeah,
and let's put a little bit of rubber to the
road and giving an example of this. Okay, that fresh
cut smell of grass okay that you smell on a
Saturday morning that reminds you of summer and whatever else
(04:26):
summer reminds you of. That actually is a very intentional
smell and it is a cry of anguish. Yeah. Yeah,
so the blades have cut that ground were but yeah,
I mean this is what happens. Actually, there's something called
green leaf volatiles, and this is released when plants suffer
tissue damage, and as you say, it can signal to
(04:49):
plants of the same or different species, or even insects. Yeah.
So these are chemical signal substances and they are really
the oldest form of language. You see them use by microbes, fungi, animals,
and plants and leaves are always emitting these volatiles in
small doses, but it's when those parasitic insects move in
that you see great quantities admitted. So some of these
(05:11):
definitely they actually attack a parasite by producing substances that
disagree with them, or they're indirectly attracting other insects that
are natural enemies of the parasites. So you can think
of think of it. On one level, it's like an
immune system that we have where something's messing with it,
it's going to release things to fight it. But then
it's also not afraid to send out that alarm signal
and say, hey, something bad going down here, like somebody
(05:34):
screaming in a dark alley, to say, hey, I'm being attacked,
sending the forces. Yeah. I think A really extreme example
of this was what German scientists found when they were
publishing their research in science. They studied wild tobacco planets
and they witnessed the hornworm caterpillars tobacco planets. Did I
say that I'm not making fun because I accidentally wrote planets? Yeah,
(05:54):
I know you meant plants. But I like the idea
of a wild tobacco planets. Okay, I do too. Well,
I don't know for everybody's health. We'll see about that.
But while tobacco plants, we're actually being attacked by horned
worn caterpillars. And what they found was that the caterpillars
saliva caused a chemical change in the g l V
compounds the plants produced. And it's that the interaction of
(06:17):
the saliva with the chemical compounds that then transmitted out. Hey, hey, guys,
guess what We're being attacked by? Delicious, juicy hornworn caterpillars,
come and get them. And those g lvs again are
green leaf volatiles, which are those chemicals we're talking about earlier.
And I think it's also fun to point out that
in the name for these caterpillars, Manduca sexta, it sounds
like a DJ, specifically like a Mexico City DJ somehow. Okay, well,
(06:43):
now we have the soundtrack to this bit. What's interesting
about this is that, of course we look at this
as human beings and say, how can we harness this
knowledge for our own use? And scientists think that we
may be able to induce the same sort of change
via genetic engineering, which might protect plants against pest without
encouraging the resistance that pests develop in response to pesticides. Okay,
(07:05):
so that we may be able to do the same
sort of distress call to protect our crops and whatnot.
But more interesting though, is the question of whether or
not plants have this rudimentary form of language. Lima beans
are another interesting example to join across this one. So
lima beans they're attacked by red mites First they change
their scent to make them unattractive to the mines. Then
(07:27):
the plants emits sense that are perceived by other plants
and they do the same thing. So all the other
line of bean plants in the area start making themselves
unattractive to these mites before they can even move in.
And then some of the emitted substances have an added
effect that they bring in other mites that will eat
the red mites. So they're kind of unleashing two volatile
weapons on these parasites. They're saying, hey, you don't like
(07:50):
me after I'll see smell gross. And they're saying, oh,
by the way, we're in conviting some friends over to
eat you. So it's a two tiered defense system they
have going on there. Yeah, I mean it's pretty hard,
and there have been people who have actually been using
this strategy it is called push pole strategy to put
certain kinds of plants around their crops to either attract
something that they knew is going to be eaten that
(08:11):
may have eaten their crop, or to repel them as
you just talked about, are actually in that instance is
taking both repel and the attracting. But there's another really
interesting thing that came up in an Ion nine article
and is called plants can think and perform computations, say scientists, really, oh, well,
there you go, let's define computations. Well, I will, I
(08:33):
will um. But it is predicated on what you brought up,
This idea that plants are trying to protect themselves and
immunize themselves against pathogens. Right. In this case, there are
a group of researchers who believe they've found the plant
equivalent of the nervous system, which functions by translating light
into chemical reactions and remembering those reactions over time. So
(08:56):
what they're saying is that plants need to analyze and
remember different wavelengths of light in order to prepare for
seasonal variations and pasts and pathogens. And Professor Karpinsky from
the University of Leeds says, every day or week of
the season has a characteristic light quality, so the plants
perform a sort of biological light computation. There you go
(09:17):
using information contained in the light to immunize themselves against
diseases that are prevalent during that season. I think that's
fascinating and we are talking about that taking that that
quality of light because we talked about this last week
about how white light is composed of different wavelengths, and
of course this varies depending on what that season is. Yeah,
and again it just it drives home how plants are
(09:40):
not this passive member of the environment. They are active
members that are computing things, that are figuring things out
and fighting off attackers. Speaking for resources, I suppose we
should take a quick break. We should, and when we
get back, we're going to talk about a plant that
has the stench of a big, glorious hunk of rotting meat.
Oh yeah, yeah, this is a favorite of it hanging there.
(10:01):
We'll be right back. We have returned, and now it's
time to discuss the titan arum on the street. It
also goes by well in Indonesia Bunga bang Kai, which
translates into corpse flower, and its Latin name is actually
a morpho thallast titanium. And uh, just in case you
(10:24):
picked up that fallast part in there, Yes, there is
a bit of a penis reference in here. That is
Latin for giant misshapen penis. Yes, it is because if
you look up a picture of the planet, does it
looks like a giant grotesque fallust. So yeah, well, actually
it's it's quite I mean, it's a weird thing to
follow that. It's actually stunning. It's kind of beautiful in
(10:46):
a way, because we're talking about is a plant that
grows to eight feet tall and it's wrapped in the
chartruse colored leaves, and when it blooms, the leaves unfurl
and you can see the interior of the leaves and
they look kind of marooney and satin ball gown looking.
And in the middle is that pale yellow that was
called the sphatics that rises up. This is the big
(11:08):
shape and penis that we're talking about. It's also interesting
that the titem Arum is not a flower technically, it's
what we call an inflorescence, which is a group of
flowers clustered around a central fleshy column. Like you said,
and I found this interesting as well. There's a little
bit of mimicry that goes on in this particular plant
because that stalk is very fleshy, it's really not doesn't
(11:28):
have a lot of substance to it. So what it
does is it mimics lien growing on that shaft so
that it looks rugged and harder than it actually is
to keep things from plowing into it. Right, Imagine this guy,
this Italian botanists a Duad Bicari, in eight seventy eight,
stumbling upon this corpse flower. He was actually trekking through
(11:49):
the rainforce of Sumatra where these are indigenous and at
first he thought that there was a dead monkey and
that was the source of the stench. But he saw
this magnificent eight foot tall flower in The closer he got,
the more he realized that this is what smelled. People
say sometimes of rotting garbage, rutting meat, uh feces, rotting
fish with burnt sugar was one description that I ran across.
(12:13):
And so he discovered this thing, and he's like, they've
got to have this in England. I'm they need this
in the UK. I'm going to send this back to
the Royal Botanic Gardens, and he did and they started
cultivating it. Because it's absurd. It is absurd. That's a
really good word for but also pretty wonderful and awful.
So let's talk about why it smells, and why is
(12:34):
not just smells, but it's incredibly pungent. Well, it needs
pollinators in the same way that you have sweet smelling
flowers that are attracting bees and whatnot to help spread
their pollen. This particular plant wants to achieve the same goal,
but it's going to find a slightly different way of
doing it. You know, a lot of competition for all
those bees and loss and butterflies, But old Titan here
(12:56):
as a different game in mind. It's going to reach
out to the carrion beetles and the flesh flies, these
insects that love nothing more than the scent of a
rotten monkey in then in the jungle. Yeah, and it's
got to go big or go home because it's such
a large plant, and it can take a year or
more for that plant to store enough energy to bloom.
In fact, when it's then cultivated botanical gardens, sometimes it
(13:19):
takes six to seven years to bloom. Yeah, you mentioned
all the energy it has to use. One of the
reasons is that it has to heat itself up in
order to really get that perfume cranking properly. Yeah, there's
this idea that it is mimicking almost like a human
body flesh fahrenheit of ninety eight point six and making
itself more attractive. Specifically, the tip of the spadix is
(13:41):
about human body temperature when it's really in full bloom. Yeah,
and so now think about that, it's really hot. It's
presenting itself as a hot hunk of meat high up
in the air, and it's telegraphing that for up to
a half mile. So all these carrying eaters and flesh
flies they come in, they're attracted to it. They want
to they want to consume it, they want to their
eggs there. They end up inadvertently carrying the pollen out
(14:03):
and spreading it, which is the whole goal here. You
had mentioned this, the carryon flies, dung beetles, the sort
of plant that this actually belongs to, or excuse me,
a should say that the species that belongs to is
a category of carrying flowers. Yours are perking up the
word carrying, which of course is referring to a carcass right.
And not only do carrying flowers smell like rotting meat,
(14:24):
they also tend to look at part. For instance, the
Stepelia asterious flower is coated with fine hairs that make
the flower resemble molgi meat. It's really deceptive in its
own way. I mean, it's it's brilliant and it is again,
it's a kind of language. I mean, what is it saying,
come over and come over here and eat my fleshy stock,
which is not flesh. Yeah, in a way, they're like
(14:46):
if you imagine a dinner party and you have all
these boisterous individuals having a conversation, and those are those
are the animals, you know, and they're loudly discussing this,
that and the other. But then you have these smaller
voices that are perking up. They're not saying much, and
they're speaking in a much lower voice, but in their
own way, they're really dictating the entire conversation. And that's
what's so fascinating about the odorous language of plants. Yeah,
(15:08):
so think about that next time you step on grass,
whether or not you're getting some tissue damage there and
there's a cry out for help. Yeah, there's not you
to think about that. There was an amusing track from
the Land Tool years and years ago and the album Sober,
which I know we have a few Tool listeners that
are listeners to this podcast, and it started off with
this kind of skip where it's like a preacher preaching
(15:29):
to a congregation and he's revealing that he has had
this revelation that the carrots have souls and have a consciousness,
and that whenever we're harvesting carrots, it's like a holocaust
of carrots. I remember finding that particularly amusing back in
the day. But it's not too far off the mark.
I mean, it's not that difficult to anthropomorphize all these
plants when you start looking at just how involved they
(15:51):
really are and how active they are in the environment.
That doesn't mean that we're going to stop stepping on grass, right,
but it does give it an insight or change our
perspective a little. But about communication, like what communication is
and what language is, and we so often think that
it has to do with our own mother tongue, but
obviously there are all these things going on behind the
scenes that we don't get a glimpse into it with myself,
(16:13):
that's that's new stuff. That's it's a trend that not
everyone's even picking up. That's true. I'm actually putting together
a slide show of the corpse flower of Old Titan.
So yeah, the lookout for that will post it on Facebook,
but we can also put it in the search bar
of how stufforks dot com and you can get a
better look at what this thing looks like. Excellent, Yeah,
(16:33):
that should be awesome. Do check it out. See what
this gigantic mutated ballast is all about, and how it's
actually resembling rotten need a little indeed, All right, well,
let's call over the robot and see what kind of
listener mail we have heard from a listener by the
name of Zach. Zach right soon and says, hi, everyone,
after you guys mentioned that we have multiple behavior altering
(16:54):
parasites in us. What would it be like if you
could get a person that was completely devoid of not
just behavior altering parasites, but anything that altered their behavior?
Would they still be them? At some point? We might
not be so much individual but more of a compositive parasites.
Maybe to be human you need to be this host
and not one single organism. The Taxo episode is great
(17:14):
and really got me thinking. I think it's one of
your best episodes, even if it creeps me out thinking
about these parasites that one deed, it is one of
those topics that really turns what it is to be
human on its head and makes you reanalyze exactly what
the human experience is all Well, I think that is
Zach's point is awesome too, that is there any sort
of pure example of non infested people running around right
(17:36):
like how this is very much when we talked about
this in terms of bacteria. To have this very much
informs the way that we perceived the world, like you know,
the guttn or bacteria we know affects our mental state.
So bravo Zac. All right, here's a little listener mail
from Anne and she's responding to our recent seven Deathly
Sends episode on lust. She says, Hi, Julian Robert, you
(17:57):
guys do a great job to mystifying many interesting, indelicate
topics for listeners of all ages in a really matter
of fact way. Love the Wrath podcast. So why do
you have such a problem with the proper words for genitalia?
Penis is not a four letter word, nor is vagina.
Especially for younger listeners. Just using those words instead of
a euphanism makes it less scary flash titializing subject. Frankly,
(18:18):
if you can't use clear language, maybe you shouldn't be
covering the topic. The more you couch information using expressions
like frank and pens, the more you make it a
forbidden area. As an adult with lots of relatives and
friends with growing and mostly now adolescent kids. It's obvious
that those parents who use and always have used direct
terminology also have the most open discussions about sex, sexual health,
(18:40):
and birth control with their kids. Hope this isn't harsh.
This has been irking me, and I really do love
the podcast. Thanks and well, I really appreciate that feedback, actually,
because I think that it's important to note that obviously
don't have a prom saying penis from a shape and
penis um. But in the context of that podcast that
we did, because it was about virtual sex, we were
trying to be really carefu all about the language. Mainly
(19:01):
that's because the power of it be don't necessarily want
us describing graphic acts. When I say, frankm Bean's a
I like that be. I'm also trying to tamp down
a little bit of the more of the graphic aspects.
So that's just to make sure that that podcast gets
delivered to your ears and we don't have any problems
if it getting red flagged. But to your point, and
(19:21):
I think that you're absolutely right about being forthright and
using correct Sandletelia names. I kind of actually rue the
day that I told my three year old about the
word volva because she uses it a lot. But yeah,
I think that it's important to demystify that as well.
But there was actually a reason why we tried to
go gentle on the language for that podcast. And here's
(19:42):
one from listener Alex. Alex says, high, I just heard
your podcast god Delivers his Calling versus Barbie and is
a Godzilla fan who has seen all twenty eight films.
I feel obligated to add some details and correct some stuff.
First of all, I have to say that you forgot
some detail to Godzilla's history. After he became a hero
like character in the six season seven these, he returned
to his darker roots back in the eighties and nineties
(20:02):
and became an anti hero. Next, you guys said that
Godzilla's veins would have to be as strong as steel.
That's not that improbable in the Godzilla universe, considering how
durable he is. You also mentioned that his body is
two hundred meters long. Godzilla at his largest is one
tall while standing. However, he might be two hundred meters
if he was laying down, and you include his tail.
(20:22):
This is excusable because you've got his mass of sixty
thousand tons. Right. Finally, I have to say that it
is mentioned in movies that Godzilla's heart is said to
act like a nuclear reactor, meaning that Godzilla is powered
by nuclear power. Since this would generate more power than
cellular respiration, his blood would not have to circulate as
much because his cells would be powered longer with nuclear
(20:45):
power and with cellular respiration, this means that his blood
pressure would not have to be as high. Sorry for
making you read through my ranting. Anyways, thanks for doing
a podcast on my favorite giant monster by Well, there
you go. No, I mean that's that's awesome. On Alwa's impressive. Yeah,
I mean, certainly he's seen all twenty eight films, so
he has he does have a deeper understanding of the
fictional physics and biology of Godzilla, and certainly having an
(21:09):
atomic heart which change things. But it doesn't mean your
heart would be more susceptible to being broken. Yeah, I
don't know. Yeah, that's stuff being a giant monster in
this world. So if you would like to reach out
to us, if you would like to share something with us,
you can find us on Facebook. You can find us
on Twitter, on Facebook and search for stuff to blow
(21:29):
your mind, and on Twitter, our handle happens to be
blow the Mind, and you can always drop us a
line at blow the Mind at Discovery dot com. Be
sure to check out our new video podcast, Stuff from
the Future. Join the House Stuffwork staff as we explore
the most promising and perplexing possibilities of tomorrow.
Welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind from how Stuff
Works dot com. Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind.
My name is Robert Lamb, and I'm Julie Douglas. Julie,
if you knew that you were going to be reincarnated,
and you were going to be reincarnated as a plant,
what plant would you choose? Yeah, beautiful blooms, nice thick leaves,
(00:28):
it's you know, it's hardy, ornamental, and yet it has substance.
Described this one to me? What does it look like?
You know? I mean sort of a plant with nice
glossy green leaves, so you know, the spade shaped right
and as I say, a beautiful pink blooms or red
or I don't know. It's something that I look out,
you know, from my window a lot. Just why it
(00:51):
came to mind so quickly, and you, um, I would
I would go with moss, some some some form of moss.
That's so gothic, that's so you it's not really gothic
like I think moss is a moss is very happy
type of plant. I mean plant. I don't know. I
can't think of a god. Plants are very god for
the most Actually, there are golf gardens, and they're beautiful.
(01:12):
I'm not kidding there these deep purple's. Um. Yeah, you
should go online and look up golf gardens. Okay, so
they're just like a lot of dark purple plants and
things of that nature. Yeah, Moss. I think of moss
is rich and vibrant, growing in the depths of woods
where never a goth has tread so um, you know,
and just living peacefully far from everything, and just you know,
(01:34):
soft and moist aesthetic about it. I will say that
monk like about moss. Yeah, yeah, yeah, you're right, not
just trying to just living there hanging out moss. Yeah,
you know, for taking it easy in the next life
as a plant. But that's one of the things we're
really going to discuss in our podcast today. Plants really
have this stereotype. It's easier to dismiss plants as being
(01:58):
this passive not even really an organism. You just think
of like plants as stuff that grows elsewhere in the
world that I have to cut back in order to
see across my lawn, that has to be maintained to
a certain degree, but otherwise isn't really a player on
the planet. Yeah, I mean especially when you think about
invasive types of plants like kudzu in the South when
(02:19):
it was introduced, just took over everything. So if you're
driving along the highway, you'll see kudzoo covered buildings. It's
just pretty monstrous looking, and so you look at it
more like, oh, man, that's such a past I gotta
I need to maintain this. But but even then, we
just think of it as this some morphous force that's
sort of coming at us. It's it's it's easy to
dismiss it and not think of it as something that
(02:40):
is actually highly sensitive bunch of organisms. I mean, yeah, yeah,
there's a secret life to plants. Yeah, and they're actively
competing for environmental resources both above the ground and below
the ground. They're assessing their surroundings and they're estimating how
much energy they need to expand granted, all of this
is taking place at a much slower pace than with
us and mols, but it's happening. And one of the
(03:01):
key things that we're gonna look at today is communication.
Ye specifically whether or not plants actually have a language
in the form of chemical compounds. Language what you say,
but wait until you hear from the stuff that we're
about to lay on you. We're specifically talking about chemical communication.
You see this in between plants, so inside plants, but
also between other plants. In fact, there are more than
(03:22):
twenty different groups of molecules related to communication in plants
that we've identified. Those are groups, So for instance, they're
up to one hundred thousand different substances that are actively
used for communication in the root zone of plants alone.
You have things like mechanical contact that are responsible for
setting off some of this communication. For instance, you'll have
(03:42):
a plant that reacts to an animal is trying to
eat it, or something touches it and discards pollen, so
that whatever's touching it will carry that pollen elsewhere, or
it is growing in such a way as to intersect
with a beam of sunlight is coming into the canopy above.
And you see these interactions between plants and other plants,
between plants and other species, other families, even the whole
(04:04):
other kingdoms. And most of these are symbiotic or parasitic relationships,
but but they exist. They're not again, they are not
passive members of the environment. They're active members of the environment. Yeah,
and let's put a little bit of rubber to the
road and giving an example of this. Okay, that fresh
cut smell of grass okay that you smell on a
Saturday morning that reminds you of summer and whatever else
(04:26):
summer reminds you of. That actually is a very intentional
smell and it is a cry of anguish. Yeah. Yeah,
so the blades have cut that ground were but yeah,
I mean this is what happens. Actually, there's something called
green leaf volatiles, and this is released when plants suffer
tissue damage, and as you say, it can signal to
(04:49):
plants of the same or different species, or even insects. Yeah.
So these are chemical signal substances and they are really
the oldest form of language. You see them use by microbes, fungi, animals,
and plants and leaves are always emitting these volatiles in
small doses, but it's when those parasitic insects move in
that you see great quantities admitted. So some of these
(05:11):
definitely they actually attack a parasite by producing substances that
disagree with them, or they're indirectly attracting other insects that
are natural enemies of the parasites. So you can think
of think of it. On one level, it's like an
immune system that we have where something's messing with it,
it's going to release things to fight it. But then
it's also not afraid to send out that alarm signal
and say, hey, something bad going down here, like somebody
(05:34):
screaming in a dark alley, to say, hey, I'm being attacked,
sending the forces. Yeah. I think A really extreme example
of this was what German scientists found when they were
publishing their research in science. They studied wild tobacco planets
and they witnessed the hornworm caterpillars tobacco planets. Did I
say that I'm not making fun because I accidentally wrote planets? Yeah,
(05:54):
I know you meant plants. But I like the idea
of a wild tobacco planets. Okay, I do too. Well,
I don't know for everybody's health. We'll see about that.
But while tobacco plants, we're actually being attacked by horned
worn caterpillars. And what they found was that the caterpillars
saliva caused a chemical change in the g l V
compounds the plants produced. And it's that the interaction of
(06:17):
the saliva with the chemical compounds that then transmitted out. Hey, hey, guys,
guess what We're being attacked by? Delicious, juicy hornworn caterpillars,
come and get them. And those g lvs again are
green leaf volatiles, which are those chemicals we're talking about earlier.
And I think it's also fun to point out that
in the name for these caterpillars, Manduca sexta, it sounds
like a DJ, specifically like a Mexico City DJ somehow. Okay, well,
(06:43):
now we have the soundtrack to this bit. What's interesting
about this is that, of course we look at this
as human beings and say, how can we harness this
knowledge for our own use? And scientists think that we
may be able to induce the same sort of change
via genetic engineering, which might protect plants against pest without
encouraging the resistance that pests develop in response to pesticides. Okay,
(07:05):
so that we may be able to do the same
sort of distress call to protect our crops and whatnot.
But more interesting though, is the question of whether or
not plants have this rudimentary form of language. Lima beans
are another interesting example to join across this one. So
lima beans they're attacked by red mites First they change
their scent to make them unattractive to the mines. Then
(07:27):
the plants emits sense that are perceived by other plants
and they do the same thing. So all the other
line of bean plants in the area start making themselves
unattractive to these mites before they can even move in.
And then some of the emitted substances have an added
effect that they bring in other mites that will eat
the red mites. So they're kind of unleashing two volatile
weapons on these parasites. They're saying, hey, you don't like
(07:50):
me after I'll see smell gross. And they're saying, oh,
by the way, we're in conviting some friends over to
eat you. So it's a two tiered defense system they
have going on there. Yeah, I mean it's pretty hard,
and there have been people who have actually been using
this strategy it is called push pole strategy to put
certain kinds of plants around their crops to either attract
something that they knew is going to be eaten that
(08:11):
may have eaten their crop, or to repel them as
you just talked about, are actually in that instance is
taking both repel and the attracting. But there's another really
interesting thing that came up in an Ion nine article
and is called plants can think and perform computations, say scientists, really, oh, well,
there you go, let's define computations. Well, I will, I
(08:33):
will um. But it is predicated on what you brought up,
This idea that plants are trying to protect themselves and
immunize themselves against pathogens. Right. In this case, there are
a group of researchers who believe they've found the plant
equivalent of the nervous system, which functions by translating light
into chemical reactions and remembering those reactions over time. So
(08:56):
what they're saying is that plants need to analyze and
remember different wavelengths of light in order to prepare for
seasonal variations and pasts and pathogens. And Professor Karpinsky from
the University of Leeds says, every day or week of
the season has a characteristic light quality, so the plants
perform a sort of biological light computation. There you go
(09:17):
using information contained in the light to immunize themselves against
diseases that are prevalent during that season. I think that's
fascinating and we are talking about that taking that that
quality of light because we talked about this last week
about how white light is composed of different wavelengths, and
of course this varies depending on what that season is. Yeah,
and again it just it drives home how plants are
(09:40):
not this passive member of the environment. They are active
members that are computing things, that are figuring things out
and fighting off attackers. Speaking for resources, I suppose we
should take a quick break. We should, and when we
get back, we're going to talk about a plant that
has the stench of a big, glorious hunk of rotting meat.
Oh yeah, yeah, this is a favorite of it hanging there.
(10:01):
We'll be right back. We have returned, and now it's
time to discuss the titan arum on the street. It
also goes by well in Indonesia Bunga bang Kai, which
translates into corpse flower, and its Latin name is actually
a morpho thallast titanium. And uh, just in case you
(10:24):
picked up that fallast part in there, Yes, there is
a bit of a penis reference in here. That is
Latin for giant misshapen penis. Yes, it is because if
you look up a picture of the planet, does it
looks like a giant grotesque fallust. So yeah, well, actually
it's it's quite I mean, it's a weird thing to
follow that. It's actually stunning. It's kind of beautiful in
(10:46):
a way, because we're talking about is a plant that
grows to eight feet tall and it's wrapped in the
chartruse colored leaves, and when it blooms, the leaves unfurl
and you can see the interior of the leaves and
they look kind of marooney and satin ball gown looking.
And in the middle is that pale yellow that was
called the sphatics that rises up. This is the big
(11:08):
shape and penis that we're talking about. It's also interesting
that the titem Arum is not a flower technically, it's
what we call an inflorescence, which is a group of
flowers clustered around a central fleshy column. Like you said,
and I found this interesting as well. There's a little
bit of mimicry that goes on in this particular plant
because that stalk is very fleshy, it's really not doesn't
(11:28):
have a lot of substance to it. So what it
does is it mimics lien growing on that shaft so
that it looks rugged and harder than it actually is
to keep things from plowing into it. Right, Imagine this guy,
this Italian botanists a Duad Bicari, in eight seventy eight,
stumbling upon this corpse flower. He was actually trekking through
(11:49):
the rainforce of Sumatra where these are indigenous and at
first he thought that there was a dead monkey and
that was the source of the stench. But he saw
this magnificent eight foot tall flower in The closer he got,
the more he realized that this is what smelled. People
say sometimes of rotting garbage, rutting meat, uh feces, rotting
fish with burnt sugar was one description that I ran across.
(12:13):
And so he discovered this thing, and he's like, they've
got to have this in England. I'm they need this
in the UK. I'm going to send this back to
the Royal Botanic Gardens, and he did and they started
cultivating it. Because it's absurd. It is absurd. That's a
really good word for but also pretty wonderful and awful.
So let's talk about why it smells, and why is
(12:34):
not just smells, but it's incredibly pungent. Well, it needs
pollinators in the same way that you have sweet smelling
flowers that are attracting bees and whatnot to help spread
their pollen. This particular plant wants to achieve the same goal,
but it's going to find a slightly different way of
doing it. You know, a lot of competition for all
those bees and loss and butterflies, But old Titan here
(12:56):
as a different game in mind. It's going to reach
out to the carrion beetles and the flesh flies, these
insects that love nothing more than the scent of a
rotten monkey in then in the jungle. Yeah, and it's
got to go big or go home because it's such
a large plant, and it can take a year or
more for that plant to store enough energy to bloom.
In fact, when it's then cultivated botanical gardens, sometimes it
(13:19):
takes six to seven years to bloom. Yeah, you mentioned
all the energy it has to use. One of the
reasons is that it has to heat itself up in
order to really get that perfume cranking properly. Yeah, there's
this idea that it is mimicking almost like a human
body flesh fahrenheit of ninety eight point six and making
itself more attractive. Specifically, the tip of the spadix is
(13:41):
about human body temperature when it's really in full bloom. Yeah,
and so now think about that, it's really hot. It's
presenting itself as a hot hunk of meat high up
in the air, and it's telegraphing that for up to
a half mile. So all these carrying eaters and flesh
flies they come in, they're attracted to it. They want
to they want to consume it, they want to their
eggs there. They end up inadvertently carrying the pollen out
(14:03):
and spreading it, which is the whole goal here. You
had mentioned this, the carryon flies, dung beetles, the sort
of plant that this actually belongs to, or excuse me,
a should say that the species that belongs to is
a category of carrying flowers. Yours are perking up the
word carrying, which of course is referring to a carcass right.
And not only do carrying flowers smell like rotting meat,
(14:24):
they also tend to look at part. For instance, the
Stepelia asterious flower is coated with fine hairs that make
the flower resemble molgi meat. It's really deceptive in its
own way. I mean, it's it's brilliant and it is again,
it's a kind of language. I mean, what is it saying,
come over and come over here and eat my fleshy stock,
which is not flesh. Yeah, in a way, they're like
(14:46):
if you imagine a dinner party and you have all
these boisterous individuals having a conversation, and those are those
are the animals, you know, and they're loudly discussing this,
that and the other. But then you have these smaller
voices that are perking up. They're not saying much, and
they're speaking in a much lower voice, but in their
own way, they're really dictating the entire conversation. And that's
what's so fascinating about the odorous language of plants. Yeah,
(15:08):
so think about that next time you step on grass,
whether or not you're getting some tissue damage there and
there's a cry out for help. Yeah, there's not you
to think about that. There was an amusing track from
the Land Tool years and years ago and the album Sober,
which I know we have a few Tool listeners that
are listeners to this podcast, and it started off with
this kind of skip where it's like a preacher preaching
(15:29):
to a congregation and he's revealing that he has had
this revelation that the carrots have souls and have a consciousness,
and that whenever we're harvesting carrots, it's like a holocaust
of carrots. I remember finding that particularly amusing back in
the day. But it's not too far off the mark.
I mean, it's not that difficult to anthropomorphize all these
plants when you start looking at just how involved they
(15:51):
really are and how active they are in the environment.
That doesn't mean that we're going to stop stepping on grass, right,
but it does give it an insight or change our
perspective a little. But about communication, like what communication is
and what language is, and we so often think that
it has to do with our own mother tongue, but
obviously there are all these things going on behind the
scenes that we don't get a glimpse into it with myself,
(16:13):
that's that's new stuff. That's it's a trend that not
everyone's even picking up. That's true. I'm actually putting together
a slide show of the corpse flower of Old Titan.
So yeah, the lookout for that will post it on Facebook,
but we can also put it in the search bar
of how stufforks dot com and you can get a
better look at what this thing looks like. Excellent, Yeah,
(16:33):
that should be awesome. Do check it out. See what
this gigantic mutated ballast is all about, and how it's
actually resembling rotten need a little indeed, All right, well,
let's call over the robot and see what kind of
listener mail we have heard from a listener by the
name of Zach. Zach right soon and says, hi, everyone,
after you guys mentioned that we have multiple behavior altering
(16:54):
parasites in us. What would it be like if you
could get a person that was completely devoid of not
just behavior altering parasites, but anything that altered their behavior?
Would they still be them? At some point? We might
not be so much individual but more of a compositive parasites.
Maybe to be human you need to be this host
and not one single organism. The Taxo episode is great
(17:14):
and really got me thinking. I think it's one of
your best episodes, even if it creeps me out thinking
about these parasites that one deed, it is one of
those topics that really turns what it is to be
human on its head and makes you reanalyze exactly what
the human experience is all Well, I think that is
Zach's point is awesome too, that is there any sort
of pure example of non infested people running around right
(17:36):
like how this is very much when we talked about
this in terms of bacteria. To have this very much
informs the way that we perceived the world, like you know,
the guttn or bacteria we know affects our mental state.
So bravo Zac. All right, here's a little listener mail
from Anne and she's responding to our recent seven Deathly
Sends episode on lust. She says, Hi, Julian Robert, you
(17:57):
guys do a great job to mystifying many interesting, indelicate
topics for listeners of all ages in a really matter
of fact way. Love the Wrath podcast. So why do
you have such a problem with the proper words for genitalia?
Penis is not a four letter word, nor is vagina.
Especially for younger listeners. Just using those words instead of
a euphanism makes it less scary flash titializing subject. Frankly,
(18:18):
if you can't use clear language, maybe you shouldn't be
covering the topic. The more you couch information using expressions
like frank and pens, the more you make it a
forbidden area. As an adult with lots of relatives and
friends with growing and mostly now adolescent kids. It's obvious
that those parents who use and always have used direct
terminology also have the most open discussions about sex, sexual health,
(18:40):
and birth control with their kids. Hope this isn't harsh.
This has been irking me, and I really do love
the podcast. Thanks and well, I really appreciate that feedback, actually,
because I think that it's important to note that obviously
don't have a prom saying penis from a shape and
penis um. But in the context of that podcast that
we did, because it was about virtual sex, we were
trying to be really carefu all about the language. Mainly
(19:01):
that's because the power of it be don't necessarily want
us describing graphic acts. When I say, frankm Bean's a
I like that be. I'm also trying to tamp down
a little bit of the more of the graphic aspects.
So that's just to make sure that that podcast gets
delivered to your ears and we don't have any problems
if it getting red flagged. But to your point, and
(19:21):
I think that you're absolutely right about being forthright and
using correct Sandletelia names. I kind of actually rue the
day that I told my three year old about the
word volva because she uses it a lot. But yeah,
I think that it's important to demystify that as well.
But there was actually a reason why we tried to
go gentle on the language for that podcast. And here's
(19:42):
one from listener Alex. Alex says, high, I just heard
your podcast god Delivers his Calling versus Barbie and is
a Godzilla fan who has seen all twenty eight films.
I feel obligated to add some details and correct some stuff.
First of all, I have to say that you forgot
some detail to Godzilla's history. After he became a hero
like character in the six season seven these, he returned
to his darker roots back in the eighties and nineties
(20:02):
and became an anti hero. Next, you guys said that
Godzilla's veins would have to be as strong as steel.
That's not that improbable in the Godzilla universe, considering how
durable he is. You also mentioned that his body is
two hundred meters long. Godzilla at his largest is one
tall while standing. However, he might be two hundred meters
if he was laying down, and you include his tail.
(20:22):
This is excusable because you've got his mass of sixty
thousand tons. Right. Finally, I have to say that it
is mentioned in movies that Godzilla's heart is said to
act like a nuclear reactor, meaning that Godzilla is powered
by nuclear power. Since this would generate more power than
cellular respiration, his blood would not have to circulate as
much because his cells would be powered longer with nuclear
(20:45):
power and with cellular respiration, this means that his blood
pressure would not have to be as high. Sorry for
making you read through my ranting. Anyways, thanks for doing
a podcast on my favorite giant monster by Well, there
you go. No, I mean that's that's awesome. On Alwa's impressive. Yeah,
I mean, certainly he's seen all twenty eight films, so
he has he does have a deeper understanding of the
fictional physics and biology of Godzilla, and certainly having an
(21:09):
atomic heart which change things. But it doesn't mean your
heart would be more susceptible to being broken. Yeah, I
don't know. Yeah, that's stuff being a giant monster in
this world. So if you would like to reach out
to us, if you would like to share something with us,
you can find us on Facebook. You can find us
on Twitter, on Facebook and search for stuff to blow
(21:29):
your mind, and on Twitter, our handle happens to be
blow the Mind, and you can always drop us a
line at blow the Mind at Discovery dot com. Be
sure to check out our new video podcast, Stuff from
the Future. Join the House Stuffwork staff as we explore
the most promising and perplexing possibilities of tomorrow.
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