A new study has found that tomato plants feel 'stressed'

Israeli researchers discovered that due to pressures from hydration, tomato plants - as well as tobacco plants - give off a sound that is undetectable to humans, but may be heard by animals when gardeners cut off their stems, and also make a sound "like bubble-wrap being popped" when they are thirsty.

Study author Professor Lilach Hadany, an evolutionary biologist and theoretician at Tel Aviv University, said: “When tomatoes are not stressed at all, they are very quiet. Even in a quiet field, there are sounds that we don’t hear, and those sounds carry information. There are animals that can hear these sounds, so there is the possibility that a lot of acoustic interaction is occurring."

The volume of the sounds is thought to be comparable to that of human conversation, and whilst researchers are unsure what exactly makes the sounds,  it is thought that a 'stressed' plant can produce the noise up to 50 times, sporadically, over the course of a single hour.

For feedback: contact the Editorial Department at onlinefeedback@gleanerjm.com.