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Plant which can count!

If I ask you what is brain! Your answer probably would be, brain is the most vital part of a living host which controls every single part of that living host same as like a processor of a computer. Now if I ask you who has brain! Your answer might be Humans, animals like cats and dogs, birds, small insects etc. or in a nutshell every living thing that moves. Now, if I ask you, do trees or plants have brain? Hmmm I can assume that your answer would be ‘no’. Trees or plants don’t move, they don’t react, and they stuck to a single place where they grow, so how can tress have brain!!! Well they actually move. Have you ever seen the plant in your bed room (if you have) which grows and moves towards the window to face the sun. Now you might say it’s a slow move and that’s no accountable, if you have a brain you interact fast because of the electrical simulation process happening in your brain. We will come to the point of do Plants have brains or not later in the article.

Venus Flytrap, credit:Wikimedia Commons

In 1760 Arthur Dobbs (1689 –1765) the Governor of North Carolina, found a plant in the swamps behind his house that would spring shot every time a bug would fall in between it and he called this plant a fly trap. When the great Charles Darwin found the plant it literary blew him away. He called this most wonderful plant in the world. This plant not only moves quickly but also carnivorous and both the cases are very rare. But these are not the coolest thing about the plant. The coolest thing about the plant is it can count.

Inside of a Venus Fly Trap there are few trigger hairs. Experiments have shown that when something touches the hair it generates electric voltage or u can say electric signal. So if you touch its trigger hair will it close? The answer is no!

To understand this behavior we need to know a little bit of the behavior of the fly trap plant.

Inscet trapped inside of a Flytrap credit:Pixabay

It takes long time to open the traps back up. It needs a lot of energy and 24 to 48hrs to open the traps.

It doesn’t need to eat too many flies through the year, its need only a handful. Because most of its energy comes from the sun.

It only opens and closes the trap handful of time until the trap dies. Therefore, it wants to be sure that there is a meal inside of it before the Fly Trap snap shot.

How do they do that! It counts ‘yes’. The number of seconds between the successive touching of those hairs, until the ideas there’s a high probability of the inside of it. When a fly touch a hair triggers it starts to count 1, 2,…. If there are several touches in between 20 seconds, it will close. Amazing isn’t it?

A Fly failed to escape the trap, credit:Pixabay

A Fly after sometimes of digestion credit:Wikimedia CommonsAuthor : Ste3986license: CC 3.0

Do plants have brain? The answer is no, they don’t have brains. They don’t have axons and neurons like humans do. But they have the abilities to do some very special things, like Venus Fly Traps can count like we human do. What is the inside mechanism of the plant and what mysterious thing inside of the plants make it so special that it act like in this manner? We actually don’t have the answer yet but someday someone will reveal. Maybe someone reading this post is the special one. But till then we have to wait for the future

References

Plant science: Plants count to five Nature Publications

Journal of Plant Physiology Elsevier Publications

Backyard Brain Web Link

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