How do plant roots suck up water?

Moment of Um

American Public Media

Kids & Family, Education For Kids

4.4 • 1.5K Ratings

🗓️ 4 December 2023

⏱️ 4 minutes

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Summary

Plants do so many different things: they grow fruits and veggies, make beautiful flowers and even pump out oxygen for us to breathe. But how do they suck up water from the dirt? We asked science communicator and plant expert Brandi Cannon-Force to help us find the answer.

Got a question that’s unbe-LEAF-ably hard to answer? Send it to us at BrainsOn.org/contact, and we’ll root around for the answer!

Transcript

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0:00.0	From the brains behind brains on, this is the moment of um.
0:05.0	Answering those questions that make you go, um... Mm-mm-mm. Mm-mm.
0:13.0	Mm-mm.
0:17.0	Mm-mm. Mm-mm.
0:21.0	Mm-mm. Moment of Um, um, come to you from APM Studios, I'm Tommy the tomato plant.
0:28.3	Um.
0:30.3	Yeah, remember me? I'm the little tomato plant your dad bought from the hardware store two months ago and plunked in a pot of dirt.
0:40.0	I remember that day like it was yesterday. The sun was shining, the birds were singing, and I thought to myself, Kami, today's the first day of the rest of your life. You're finally going home and you're going to grow delicious cherry tomatoes.
0:54.0	But guess what?
0:57.0	No one remembered to water me.
0:59.0	I've been living on your patio in the beating sun without so much as a drop to drink. Do you know how hard it is to produce
1:06.0	high quality super sweet cherry tomatoes without water? Look at these little shriveled up things. They don't even look like tomatoes. If only I could get a sip of water,
1:15.8	I'd suck it all up to my roots and be a brand new plant. I don't know how it works. It just works. My buddy Sebastian Brandy Cannon Force and I am a
1:39.8	PhD student at Stanford University. I study science education and I study plant. It's sort of a transportation
1:48.4	tissue so it allows for water to be sucked straight up. Water is actually really attracted to itself. So when
1:57.2	one water molecule was being pulled up, they kind of hold hands and they create a chain of
2:01.5	water molecules that are pulled all the way up through the straw and through to the leaves.
2:06.0	Now you're thinking, okay, that kind of makes sense.
2:10.0	The water being pulled up and through the tree and through the leaves, but why does that happen?
2:15.2	Well, it's because the sun is causing evaporation to happen on the surface of the leaves.
2:21.1	So just the same way that we sweat, water is being pulled out of our bodies, is the same way that tree sweat through
2:26.9	transpiration with water being pulled out of their leaves. So that sun sort of pools up in water and the water cleans on to itself and the action goes all the way down to the roots.
	...

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