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What A Plant Knows: A Field Guide To The Senses (2012)

by Daniel Chamovitz(Favorite Author)

3.89 of 5 Votes: 1

ISBN

0374288739 (ISBN13: 9780374288730)

languge

English

genre

Nonfiction

publisher

Scientific American / Farrar, Straus and Giroux

review 1: I found this book to be charmingly written and perfectly acceptable, science-wise, for a pop science book. It does a good job of relating plant sensory abilities to animal ones without excessively anthropomorphizing them, which is quite a feat! If you want to know more about the world of plants (and a bit about animals too, if you're not familiar with biology), this is a quick and pleasant read. I'd love to know how it reads to people without a biology background, though, because while I found it to be not too complex, I don't know if it would seem so to someone with less technical background.
review 2: A fascinating little book. Describes how plants sense things - how they detect and respond to light, touch, smell, sound, and how a plant remembers - with the e... morexperiments that led to these conclusions. It describes Darwin's experiment that determined that the it is the tip of plants that sense the presence of light. It describes the experiments determined how ethylene induces ripening, and how it the trait evolved as a response to environmental stresses such as drought and as a mechanism to ensure uniform ripening (in order to attract animals that would eat and spread the plants seed). It discusses how plants emit defense hormones (such as salicylic acid) when wounded or infected to activate immune reactions elsewhere in the plant. It describes experiments that discovered how plants feel touch and how they respond. It describes how some plants even "remember", that allows them to differentiate spring from fall (when temperatures, length of day, rainfall may be similar) based on what preceded it; this is crucial in telling a plant when to sprout, flower, produce, etc.The author also looks at hearing and evaluates the popular claim, based on experiments, that plants grow better with classical music than with rock. As it turns out, plants can't hear. You'll have to read the book to find out how the initial claim was made and how it was subsequently disproved. less

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