Hello everyone welcome back to the podcast today we are looking at a

interesting factoid or a way of thinking I suppose about plants. Do plants respond to touch? Do they get impacted by us interacting with them or the environment interacting with them?

Well, I think there's sort of two ways of thinking

about this question.

Of course, plants respond to touch in some sense.

The question is, at what level do they right and so I've talked a lot about a plant called

Mimosa Pudica which is a sensitive plant that's one of the nicknames the common names for it

and it does respond to touch very obviously.

As soon as you touch it, the leaves coil up

and the leaf petiole will drop down oftentimes. and it's absolutely crazy how fast it happens.

So that is very quick, that is a different process and then you have another type of touch

called Thigmomorphogenesis and basically what that is is a more

longer term change in the appearance of a plant based on the type of touch or stimulus that it is getting, right?

So you can induce it in a lot of different types of plants.

Wind is one way to do it. The spray of water, snow on it, if it's touching

another plant, animals, insects, a lot of different things can cause a change in the

appearance of a plant based on how it's being interacted with.

So if you look at things like beans or corn, any of these vegetables that we like to grow,

you can impact the length of the stem by blowing wind on it, right?

Blowing wind can create a thicker, more stout appearance to the stem. Of course your lighting has to be right.

If you continually rub or brush up on shrubs that will be

a little bit shorter and a little bit wider.

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