A new study published this week in the journal Current Biology has found that plants are actually smart enough to make decisions. They also have an amazing ability to calculate risks in those choices in order to get the most nutrients they can in order to better survive.
An international team of researchers studied the decisions pea plants make when presented with environments having differing nutrient levels. The plants showed that they were able to take calculated risks in order to get the most nutrients.
In a press release, Alex Kacelnik of Oxford University said, “To our knowledge, this is the first demonstration of an adaptive response to risk in an organism without a nervous system.” He also said that the researchers did not come to the conclusion that plants have the same sort of intelligence as humans or other animals, but that it is possible to predict their complex behaviors based on processes that will exploit their natural opportunities.
Kacelnik and his colleagues grew the pea plants with the roots split between two pots, one of which had more nutrients than the other. The plants made the decision to expend their efforts to grow more roots in the pot with more nutrients, similar to the decisions animals make to forage in richer food patches.
The team then split the roots of each plant between pots offering the same average nutrient levels, but levels in one pot were constant and the other varied, wondering whether they would choose the pot with the higher risk because it sometimes offered higher levels of food. They found that the plants chose the variable pot when the nutrient level was higher than the constant pot, demonstrating a willingness to take calculated risks.
Although uncertain as to how the plants sense variance, the scientists are still surprised at the decision-making skills demonstrated. Efrat Dener, of Ben-Gurion University in Israel, says, “I used to look at plants as passive receivers of circumstances. 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.”