Hear those crispy rice grains calling for help? Snap! Crackle! Pop!

New scientific findings are often fun and interesting, but how some "journalists" write about such things is annoying to the nth degree.  Xylem consists of a series of cellulosic tubes and during water stress, the transpirational pull upon the water columns, a force generated by water loss from leaves, can generate air embolisms.  In a manner of speaking, xylem gets the bends.  A research group has found that formation of these air bubbles makes sounds.  Now that's not all that unexpected or surprising.  Ever listen to the bubbles of carbon dioxide rising from your carbonated beverage?  That hiss you hear is the sound of all those bursting bubbles. If you had sufficiently fine listening devices, and slowed down the sounds recorded, you could probably listen to each individual bursting bubble.  Or how about the sound of air bubbles being made in a drinking straw when your sucking has lowered the level of the liquid to nearly the bottom?  Now the finding that air bubbles in the tiny xylem "straws" in a tree make a noise when forming is somewhat interesting but mostly because people don't think about trees making any noise.  Now here's where the newsy report goes seriously arwy.  It's not a "drought distress call" any more than your crispy rice cereal is calling for help to keep from drowning in the milk.  Scheesh!  This puts this report into a category of bad journalism by making a physical thing that can be explained in a non-technical way into something vaguely anthropomorphic. Was embolism too technical?  Or xylem? Where do the find these writers?  Oh, yeah, far away from science.

More on personified plants

Over on the AoB blog an article demonstrates that thinking of plants as people is often misleading. "There are times when anthropomorphising plants can effectively hide what is so fascinating about them." Ya think?

Does botanical research offend the dignity of plants?

The Swiss ethics committee has declared that plant scientists are not allowed to do research that offends the dignity of plants. This initially struck me as hard to believe because I think of the Swiss as a pretty level-headed and practical people, but this is just goofy.

Maybe this was just a Swiss attempt at humor. But this is for real and my botanical colleagues must deal with this. Now I do think certain plants have a majesty, and they certainly can be violated, for example, by cutting down redwood trees to make somebody a porch deck. But is the dignity of a cabbage offended when it is converted into coleslaw? Does it regain any of its dignity when converted into sauerkraut? Are my prairie plants dignified? Does a fertilizer treatment offend them?

You really have to wonder about what kind of cuckoos are on the Swiss ethics committee because they are guilty of pure anthropomorphic thinking. Unfortunately until some level heads prevail, my botanical colleagues in Switzerland are stuck dealing with this.

What this is all about is a resistance to genetically modified crops. And we must presume that altering a plant’s genetics is an affront to its dignity. I guess a certain case can be made for that. Let’s face it, a toy poodle doesn’t have too much dignity. But humans have been altering the genetics of plants ever since their domestication began. Wonder if ethicists like seedless grapes? Have they ever had a fertile banana? Eating around all those big, hard seeds is something special. What could be a bigger offense to the biological dignity of an organism than to propagate sterile plants when their whole purpose was to reproduce?

So who will decide what offends the dignity of plants? To help out the Phytophactor will channel your research plants to determine if their dignity is offended, for a modest fee, payable in Swiss cheeses, of course.