10 Story Idea? Email Paul.Nolan@Farms.com Better Farming | October 2024 Research In a new study, physicists from the United States and Israel may have gotten to the bottom of a quirky behavior of growing plants – and a mystery that intrigued Charles Darwin himself during the later decades of his life. For many humans, plants might seem stationary and even a little dull. But green things actually move a lot. If you watch a timelapse video of a sunflower seedling poking up from the soil, for example, it doesn’t just shoot straight up. Instead, as the sunflower grows, its crown spins in circles, twists into corkscrews and, in general, wiggles around – albeit very slowly. Now, researchers co-led by Orit Peleg at CU Boulder and Yasmine Meroz at Tel Aviv University have discovered one role for these chaotic movements, also known as “circumnutations.” In greenhouse experiments and computer simulations, the group showed that sunflowers take advantage of circumnutations to search the environment around them for patches of sunlight. “A lot of people don't really consider the motion of plants because, as humans, we're usually looking at plants at the wrong frame rate,” said Peleg, a co-author of the study and an associate professor in the BioFrontiers Institute and Department of Computer Science. The team published its findings Aug. 15 in the journal Physical Review X. The findings could one day help farmers to come up with new strategies for growing an array of crops in more efficient arrangements. “Our team does a lot of work on social interactions in insect swarms and other groups of animals,” said Chantal Nguyen, lead author and a postdoctoral researcher at BioFrontiers. “But this research is particularly exciting because we’re seeing similar dynamics in plants. They’re rooted to the ground.” Darwin’s cucumbers Nguyen added that plants don’t usually shift around like animals but, instead, move by growing in different directions over time. This phenomenon enchanted Darwin long after he returned from his voyage on the HMS Beagle, according to historical accounts. In the 1860s, Darwin, who was then suffering from a range of ailments that limited his own mobility, spent days observing plants at his home. He planted seeds from cucumbers and other species, then traced how their crowns moved around from day to day – the resulting maps look wild and haphazard. WHY DO PLANTS WIGGLE? New study provides answers. From the University of Colorado at Boulder The findings could help farmers come up with new strategies for growing crops in more efficient arrangements. NSMediaPhoto - stock.adobe.com
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