Everything you want to know about plants

Can plants drown?

Yes, plants can drown if you over water it. Plants produce oxygen and use the same oxygen to live and breathe. At night they need oxygen to breathe. If you stop a plant from getting oxygen for example by saturating the soil with water or submerging the whole plant in water then they can’t breathe.

How do plants grow with artificial lights?

There are two things we should keep in mind when it comes to plants and life. The first is how much light they get the intensity of light and the second point is what quality of light or what wavelength of light. It is easy to underestimate how bright the sun is on a sunny day so if we try to recreate that intensity of sunlight in a room we need quite a lot of lamps. Plants have found ways of dealing with very variable amounts of lights and so if you grow them in lower intensity light. They will grow but a bit slow but they can easily deal with that. But they do need the right quality of light, they need red light to do photosynthesis and a little bit of blue light as well to regulate growth. We can recreate it in the lab with LEDs with red and a few blue lights.

Can plants feel pain?

If you ask a neuroscientist pain is something that our brain creates. Plants don’t have a brain, they don’t have a central nervous system, and they don’t have processing power like a brain. But in terms of evolution, we feel the pain to make us react very quickly to danger to the difficult situation that we want to run away from and it makes us react very quickly. For example, we take the handoff of a hot plate to run away from danger. So, plants can’t do that because they are rooted in place and so you could argue it doesn’t make sense for plants to feel pain in the way we do. But plants do react to the sorts of things that give us pain. For example, if you cut off a leaf of a plant or if you crush it they react to that, there is an electrical signal that sends from the wounded place throughout the plant and many of things like insects chewing on a plant or cow grazing on a plant do trigger some responses like a plant trying to defend itself some of them do that by producing compounds that make the leaf taste bad. Response to wounding and danger are lot more settle than you would get from an animal that feels pain and there’s no brain that processes this information but plants do react to these things in a way could then say they feel pain.