Plants have previously been found to "feel" and can even "hear" people eating. Now, a study has demonstrated pea plants "gamble."
This essentially means they make "adaptive choices that take into account environmental variance", something that had only ever been seen in the animal kingdom.
Pea plants were placed with their roots in two separate pots – meaning they had to "choose" which pot to prioritise.
Initially, the plants grew more roots in a pot "endowed with higher levels of nutrients", which the researchers said resembled animals' foraging efforts in "richer food patches".
In follow-up experiments, the plants were split between two pots with equal nutrient levels, though one pot had a "constant level" and the other had a "variable level".
The team from the University of Oxford and Tel-Hai College, Israel predicted the plants would prefer the higher risk "variable" pot when its nutrient level was low, and the risk averse "constant" pot when nutrient levels were high.
"This is exactly what the pea plants did," the team wrote in Current Biology.
"To our knowledge, this is the first demonstration of an adaptive response to risk in an organism without a nervous system," said Alex Kacelnik, co-author of the research and professor at the department of Zoology at Oxford university.
In particular, the pea plants were risk prone, meaning they grew more roots in the unpredictable pot, when the mean nutrient concentration of both pots was below 0.01g. They were risk averse, meaning they grew more roots in the constant pot, when the mean nutrient concentration was 0.15g or higher.
"We do not conclude that plants are intelligent in the sense used for humans or other animals, but rather that complex and interesting behaviours can theoretically be predicted as biological adaptations - and executed by organisms - on the basis of processes evolved to exploit natural opportunities efficiently," continued Kacelnik.
These findings could change our view of plants as "passive receivers of circumstances".
To put this experiment into the context of a human gamble, if you have a choice between a guaranteed £800, or tossing a coin to receive £1,000 for heads and nothing for tails, which one should you choose?
Most people realise the first option pays more on average. But imagine you are stranded with no money in a remote place, the fare to get home costs £900, and you are allowed a single toss of the coin. Now the coin-toss gives you an even chance of raising the funds you need, whereas the "safe" option will always fall just short.
"This line of experiments illustrates how wrong that view is: living organisms are designed by natural selection to exploit their opportunities, and this often implies a great deal of flexibility," said Efrat Dener, Ben Gurion University, Israel.
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
