I love food. But having loved food a little too much the past year and change, I found myself the awful situation of having to diet. I decided to cut out alcohol (no), cheese (no!), and carbs (no!!!) for a whole month, and focus on eating just meat and vegetables. How hard could it be?
Honestly, it was great, and I ended up firming up my relationship with veggies. A trope in these types of diets seems to be replacing the space carbs would take up on your plate with vegetables. This means cooking and cutting a lot of veggies.
Little did I know… this also meant torturing a lot of veggies.
….huh?
According to a study from Tel-Aviv University, plants have been recorded emitting ultrasonic sounds when cut or left in drought conditions. This means that (take this logical leap with me, please) each vegetable I was mutilating all month may have been screaming out in pain the entire time. In other words, I learned I had (tomato) blood on my hands.🔪 I needed to get to the bottom of this.
Looking into the paper a bit, I read that researchers recorded sounds made by tomato and tobacco plants under normal conditions, after being left without water, and after being cut. The plants were left in an anechoic box and ultrasonic frequencies were recorded via two microphones placed about 10 centimeters away from the plants. Control plants were observed as well as plants that were cut or left unwatered. Below a simple depiction of the test setup (“acoustic” apparently means “anechoic” here…)
To determine how many times a tomato plants screamed under certain conditions, researchers counted the number of sounds emitted by the plants each hour, plotted below:
“Neighbor-Control” and “Self-Control” are sounds counted by other control plants and the same plant before it was cut or left unwatered (fact: tomatoes do have a “normal” sound they emit about once an hour). “Treated” represents the plants that were either cut or left unwatered. We can see many more noises emitted by these plants.
Show me the tomato scream already
Alright, alright, let’s cut to the chase. Ladies and gentlemen, behold: the sound of a tomato screaming
Though admittedly not the best graph, researchers say they measured these sounds at about 57 kHz at 60 dB SPL—wait a minute… we’re shown 60 dB… on the y-axis of a linear waveform?? The more I look the less sense it makes… so level is oscillating between +60 and -60 dB huh? These researchers have some explaining to do. To be honest this kind of puts me off of this paper a bit, but I’m too deep into writing this to turn around now!
Regardless of how loud this scream actually is, thankfully, 57 kHz is well above the highest frequency humans can hear. So we (I) don’t have to feel guilty about anything. Phew.
If a tomato screams and no one can hear it, does it actually scream?
While writing this I was concerned that maybe my dog could have heard all my poor vegetables screaming while being plucked or cut and I was very concerned. It was a massive relief to see that my dog couldn’t hear my tomatos being tortured either. 😱 But let’s just say that if you have a gerbil, you should keep them in another room while you cut veggies…
Looking into animal hearing frequency ranges, I realized that many other animals should in fact be able to hear these sounds. This begs the question: what would stop a benevolent animal from saving a tomato in distress? The authors discuss that animals may, in fact, have some incentive to intervene:
“…if plants emit sounds in response to a caterpillar attack, predators such as bats could use these sounds to detect attacked plants and prey on the herbivores, thus assisting the plant.“
As long as there is something in it for the bat I guess!
Okay, I’ll level with you… I WANT to hear the tomato scream
Well, fortunately or unfortunately for you, there are people out there that want to hear plants enough to have made an app for that. The world is a big place.
The inventors of PlantWave have apparently developed an app that allows plants to play music based on “slight electrical variations” over the surface of the plant. I’ve watched this video a few times on repeat and still am not sure if this is a late April fools joke or…
(My favorite quote: “With PlantWave, you’ll be able to wirelessly connect from your plant to your phone”. FINALLY.)
Now I’ll have to download this and cut some tomatoes up in real-time to see if I start hearing death metal… I’ll report back soon!
