Plants Talk to Each Other

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Really!</B></div> <div> That strawberry plant in your backyard is smarter than you think.</div> <div> Some types of plants establish networks with their stems so they can communicate with each other and warn against danger, according to researchers from Radboud University in the Netherlands.</div> <bR> <div> LiveScience.com reports that this unique internal network allows plants to warn against predators and potential enemies.</div> <bR> <div> The key to the network is the horizontal stem, typical of many herbal plants, such as strawberry, clover, reed and ground elder.</div> <bR> <div> These horizontal stems physically bond the plants--think green cables--along the soil surface and underneath the ground.</div> <div> Those stems are called runners. </div> <bR> <div> "Network-like plants do not usually produce vertical stems but their stems lie flat on the ground and can hence be used as network infrastructure," lead researcher Josef Stuefer explained to LiveScience.com reporter Sara Goudarzi.</div> <bR> <div> <B>How do they know this?</B></div> <div> Caterpillars. The team released 15 caterpillars on white clover plants and watched as they ate a single leaf on the plants' network.</div> <div> Then they let loose a second batch of caterpillars, allowing them to choose between the damaged leaf and leaves that were undamaged in a different plant network. They did this 20 times. In each trial, the caterpillars preferred the undamaged leaf to the leaf from a damaged network.</div> <bR> <div> Stuefer theorizes that the damaged leaf had alerted its network to the predator danger.</div> <bR> <div> "The feeding caterpillars will be deterred and walk off to feed on other non-induced plants," Stuefer told LiveScience.com. "[They] understand plant defense language very well as it is directed exactly to them."</div> <bR> <div> <B>How do plants talk to each other?</B></div> <div> When a leaf is mauled by caterpillars, the rest of the plant network is warned by an internal signal to boost its chemical and mechanical resistance.</div> <bR> <div> That resistance actually makes the plants' leaves hard to chew on, so they become less desirable to a predator. "This is an early warning system, very much like in military defense, but then more effective.</div> <bR> <div> Each member of the network can receive the external signal of impending herbivore danger and transmit it to the other members of the network," Stuefer explained to LiveScience.com.</div> <div> The attacked leaf is lost. However, the remaining leaves are protected against predators."</div> <bR> <div> <B>There is one big disadvantage, though:</B></div> <div> Plant viruses and pathogens use this same runner system, much like a computer virus, to spread quickly, entering the plant through the leaves and then passing into the stems where they are transported throughout the network. </div> <div> The study findings were published in the journal Oecologia. </div> <div> <I>--From the Editors at Netscape</I></div> </td> </tr></table></body>