Zoë Schlanger > Quotes

“But science’s biggest flaw and biggest virtue is that it almost always mistakes agreement for truth.”
― Zoë Schlanger, The Light Eaters: How the Unseen World of Plant Intelligence Offers a New Understanding of Life on Earth

“It's not that plants are human but that humans are just one kind of person.”
― Zoë Schlanger, The Light Eaters: How the Unseen World of Plant Intelligence Offers a New Understanding of Life on Earth

“A good idea has a habit of showing up again and again.”
― Zoë Schlanger, The Light Eaters: How the Unseen World of Plant Intelligence Offers a New Understanding of Life on Earth

“Perhaps scientists should be more open to losing their grip on the rationalist certainties that sustain their”
― Zoë Schlanger, The Light Eaters: How the Unseen World of Plant Intelligence Offers a New Understanding of Life on Earth

“All biology, I began to understand, is in fact ecology. Ecosystem dynamics that ecologists study apply just as easily to single plants themselves. Resources like food and water fluctuate in an ecosystem, which causes different individuals to take up residence in different groupings at different times.”
― Zoë Schlanger, The Light Eaters: How the Unseen World of Plant Intelligence Offers a New Understanding of Life on Earth

“Several species of plants have been found to identify a caterpillar’s species by sensing the compounds in its saliva, and then synthesize the exact compounds to summon its predator. Parasitic wasps then obligingly arrive to take care of the caterpillars.”
― Zoë Schlanger, The Light Eaters: How the Unseen World of Plant Intelligence Offers a New Understanding of Life on Earth

“In many ways, Kaua‘i is the ultimate example of what a world would look like if plants were in charge. The whole island is covered in the surreal products of total floral freedom. When plants are allowed to evolve without fear, they get scrupulously and flamboyantly specific. Take the Hibiscadelphus genus, for example. Found only in Hawai‘i, these plants have long tubular flowers, custom-made to fit the hooked beak of the honeycreeper, the precise bird that pollinates them. Then there is the vulcan palm, Brighamia insignis, or ‘Ōlulu in Hawaiian, a short tree best described by its nickname, “cabbage on a stick.” Over tens of thousands of years, it has evolved to be pollinated only by the extremely rare fabulous green sphinx moth (its real name). The vulcan palm, still critically endangered in the wild, was saved from total extinction by Perlman’s work in the early days of the extinction prevention program, when he made his own harness out of knotted ropes and used it to hang over the Nā Pali Coast cliffs. There, four thousand feet in the air, he would use a small cosmetic brush borrowed from his wife to imitate the moth, carefully transferring the pollen from the males to the females. “You’d know if you did it well,” Perlman said. “When you’d go back, there’d be fruits just bursting open with seed.” (The vulcan palm is now cultivated as a houseplant in the Netherlands, where there are greenhouses full of them. I wonder if a person with a potted Vulcan palm on their Amsterdam windowsill knows of the drama it took to get it there.)”
― Zoë Schlanger, The Light Eaters: How the Unseen World of Plant Intelligence Offers a New Understanding of Life on Earth

“It’s that lack of faith in the public that always results in an erosion of the level of public discourse. A faithlessness in the public is a self-fulfilling prophecy. Remove complexity, and the capacity for complexity degrades farther. I think people can be trusted to handle a complicated truth. Plants are not omnipotent, otherworldly creatures. They are also not just like us. But neither are they neither of these things. There are elements of reality in both images, and fallacy in both too. This is hard stuff: one needs to welcome ambiguity and delight in the lack of easy tropes. Complexity is the rule in nature, after all. Thinking through this requires occupying a mental space of in-betweenness rarely tolerated in our contemporary world concerned with linear narratives and known entities. Báyò Akómoláfé, a Yoruba poet and philosopher, wrote about this in-betweenness, contemplating the way all creatures are in fact composite organisms. The state of nature is one of interpenetration and mingling that defies easy categorization. It occupies a middle place, both in the material reality of the world and in our understanding of it. “The middle I speak of is not halfway between two poles; it is porousness that mocks the very idea of separation,” he writes. Akómoláfé outlines our collective biological reality as a state of “brilliant betweenness” that “defeats everything, corrodes every boundary, spills through marked territory, and crosses out every confident line.” It reminds me of Trewavas, telling me in his living room outside Edinburgh that scientists don’t know enough about plants to say anything dogmatic about them.”
― Zoë Schlanger, The Light Eaters: How the Unseen World of Plant Intelligence Offers a New Understanding of Life on Earth

“Moral attention is not a finite resource.”
― Zoë Schlanger, The Light Eaters: How the Unseen World of Plant Intelligence Offers a New Understanding of Life on Earth

“In the last decade and a half a revival of plant behavior research had brought countless new realizations to botany, more than forty years after an irresponsible best-selling book nearly snuffed out the field for good. The Secret Life of Plants, published in 1973, captured the public imagination on a global scale. Written by Peter Tompkins and Christopher Bird, the book was a mix of real science, flimsy experiments, and unscientific projection. In one chapter, Tompkins and Bird suggested that plants could feel and hear—and that they preferred Beethoven to rock and roll. In another, a former CIA agent named Cleve Backster hooked up a polygraph test to his houseplant and imagined the plant being set on fire. The polygraph needle went wild, which would mean the plant was experiencing a surge in electrical activity. In humans, a reading like that was believed to denote a surge of stress. The plant, according to Backster, was responding to his malevolent thoughts. The implication was that there existed not only a sort of plant consciousness but also plant mind-reading. The book was an immediate and meteoric success on the popular market, surprising for a book about plant science. Paramount put out a feature film about it. Stevie Wonder wrote the soundtrack. The first pressings of the album version were sent out scented with floral perfume. To its many astonished readers, the book offered a new way to view the plants all around them, which up until then had seemed ornamental, passive, more akin to the world of rocks than animals. It also aligned with the advent of New Age culture, which was ready to inhale stories about how plants were as alive as we are. People began talking to their houseplants, and leaving classical music playing for their ficus when they went out. But it was a beautiful collection of myths.”
― Zoë Schlanger, The Light Eaters: How the Unseen World of Plant Intelligence Offers a New Understanding of Life on Earth

“In 1995, then-president Bill Clinton got word that the U. S. Department of Agriculture was funding studies on “stress in plants” with taxpayer money. He even made a jibe about it in that year’s State of the Union Address, implying that he thought the study was about plants needing psychotherapy, and promised to cut such wasteful spending.”
― Zoë Schlanger, The Light Eaters: How the Unseen World of Plant Intelligence Offers a New Understanding of Life on Earth

“Usually, when scientists measure characteristics of organisms—whether plants or animals—they look at the average of the tendencies of the entire group. For at least the last hundred years in plant biology, individual plants within a species have been seen as replicants. No individual trait matters to science, which only looks at the average of the traits of the entire population. If one individual falls too far outside the average, it tends to get discarded from the study as an outlier. “What individuals do is seen as just noise,” Karban explains. But his work with sagebrush throws away the relevance of averages. Personality research treats individual differences as valuable data. Each one is a point on the spectrum of behavior. The noise becomes the signal. “This is the opposite approach: It’s paying attention to the variation among individuals.”
― Zoë Schlanger, The Light Eaters: How the Unseen World of Plant Intelligence Offers a New Understanding of Life on Earth

“Within a decade, evidence to support Dudley’s work began flowing in. In 2017 a researcher in Argentina found that sunflower farmers could get up to 47 percent more oil yield from their plants if they grew them in rows with kin closely packed next to one another. They grew the flowers at densities unheard of in sunflower farming, but instead of attacking each other underground, as closely grown sunflowers were assumed to always do, they did the opposite: aboveground, the sunflowers tilted their stalks at alternating angles to avoid shading their kin-neighbors. There was no sign that they were robbing each other of nutrients, either. If they were allowed to grow at odd angles, rather than be forced to stand straight up, each flower received more light, and oil production skyrocketed.”
― Zoë Schlanger, The Light Eaters: How the Unseen World of Plant Intelligence Offers a New Understanding of Life on Earth

“Chipmunks have distinct distress calls; one for when they detect an aerial predator, like a hawk, and another for a land predator. Some chipmunks, she said, would squeal all the time. “Some guys would be eating seeds, and a leaf falls on the ground. They panic and they make a call,” she said, screaming their little heads off about an imagined bird of prey. Those were the shy ones. “Some guys just keep foraging.” When she controlled for sex, social status, and age, there were still distinct differences in chipmunks’ personalities that remained stable over time. Some chipmunks were risk-takers, others were not. Of course, these distress squalls are heard by other chipmunks. What the other chipmunks choose to do with that information seems to depend on how reliable the squaller was. “The main idea is that if you have some guys who cry wolf all the time, they shouldn’t be trusted.” She recorded calls from a range of chipmunks who fell on different places along what she and her colleagues called the “shyness-boldness continuum,” and played them back to other chipmunks. The listeners perked up and paid attention when they heard a distress signal coming from a bold chipmunk, and seemed not to care as much about one from the oft-panicked.”
― Zoë Schlanger, The Light Eaters: How the Unseen World of Plant Intelligence Offers a New Understanding of Life on Earth

“in Appel’s work, a sound cue caused the plant to make its own pesticide. If plants could be made to produce pesticides through simply playing sounds to them, it could reduce or eliminate the need for synthetic pesticides on farms, and in some cases increase the levels of compounds that the crop in question is grown for. In a crop like mustard, for example, the plants’ own pesticide is the very thing it is farmed for—mustard oil. Putting a lavender bush on high alert by playing the right sounds would cause it to make more of the defensive compounds we prize in lavender oil.”
― Zoë Schlanger, The Light Eaters: How the Unseen World of Plant Intelligence Offers a New Understanding of Life on Earth

“In 1985, Wouter van Hoven was in his office in the zoology department at Pretoria University when he got an unusual call from a wildlife warden. In the last month, more than a thousand kudu, a particularly majestic species of antelope with elegant stripes and long, curling horns, had dropped dead on multiple game ranches in the nearby Transvaal region. The same thing had happened the winter before. In total some three thousand kudu had died. Nothing seemed wrong with them, no open wounds, no disease, though some looked a little thin. Could he come out as soon as possible? The ranch owners were beside themselves. Van Hoven was a wildlife nutrition zoologist who specialized in African ungulates. He should be able to figure this out, he thought. He’d be over right away. When Van Hoven got to the first game ranch, dead kudu were lying about as if a war had just been fought. But the first thing he noticed after the stench was that there were too many of them for a ranch that size. As a rule, there should not be more than three kudu per 100 hectares, and this ranch had about fifteen per 100. The same was true at the next few ranches he visited. Game-ranch hunting had exploded in popularity, and to cash in, ranchers were pushing the limits of their land. He opened up several kudu and saw stomachs full of crushed acacia leaves, undigested. He looked out at the giraffes, who were spread out along a swath of savanna, nibbling acacia trees and evidently not dying. After a few weeks a picture began to come together: when acacias begin to be eaten, they increase the bitter tannin in their leaves. Van Hoven already knew this. It’s a gentle defensive mechanism. At first, the tannin rises just a little. It’s not dangerous, but it tastes bad. Typically, that’s enough to deter a kudu. But both of the last two winters were extremely dry. All the grass was dead. Too many kudu, penned in by game fences, had nothing else to eat and nowhere else to go. He figured they had continued eating the acacia leaves, despite the bitter taste, because they had to. He pulled out a few clumps of chewed acacia leaves from a kudu gut and brought them to a lab. Kudu, Van Hoven knew, could handle about 4 percent tannin content in a leaf. Above that is trouble. The acacia, he figured, kept raising the level of tannin in the leaves, tit for tat. The kudu kept eating. And then, clearly, the acacias delivered a lethal dose. The undigested leaves Van Hoven tested from the kudu’s stomachs were 12 percent tannin.”
― Zoë Schlanger, The Light Eaters: How the Unseen World of Plant Intelligence Offers a New Understanding of Life on Earth

“Scientists have long observed that virtually all plants are highly sensitive to touch of any kind, and will change their growth accordingly. They even have a word for this phenomenon: thigmomorphogenesis. Darwin described touch sensitivity in plants in the late 1800s, but the phenomenon has been known to farmers for much longer. In traditional agricultural practices from many regions, whipping, prodding, or otherwise flagellating certain crop plants was thought to induce heartier growth, or help prevent a plague of pests. In the 1970s and ’80s, a plant physiologist in Ohio more or less confirmed this folk knowledge by stroking the stems of plants in a greenhouse each day. Mordecai Jaffe, or “Mark” to most people, found that repeatedly pestering plants made them tougher. He began his investigation by fastidiously stroking several varieties of rather ordinary plants: barley, cucumber, common bean, castor bean, and English mandrake. If he stroked a plant once, it wouldn’t change. But if he stroked them over and over, for about ten seconds once or twice a day, they would change quite a lot. The response was fast: within three minutes of his beginning to rub its stem, the plant would slow or even cease elongating, which it was otherwise doing all the time. When Jaffe stopped stroking the plant, it would begin to elongate rapidly, even faster than its normal growth rate, as if making up for lost time. In Cherokee wax bean plants, the stroked stems would grow girthier, and harden. It becomes impossible not to make jokes about this, but it was also serious business: Jaffe coined the word “thigmomorphogenesis,” and a whole new field of plant touch studies was born.”
― Zoë Schlanger, The Light Eaters: How the Unseen World of Plant Intelligence Offers a New Understanding of Life on Earth

“But the tent caterpillar invasion on university grounds provided the perfect scenario to study his theory in the real world. The besieged trees did eventually change the composition of their leaves, sickening the caterpillars, who would essentially die of starvation through diarrhea. He was pleased. His theory checked out. But he also noticed something else: even the leaves of faraway trees, which the caterpillars had not yet touched, changed their composition too. They’d been warned, and somehow the warning had traveled a long distance. Plants are tremendous at chemical synthesis,”
― Zoë Schlanger, The Light Eaters: How the Unseen World of Plant Intelligence Offers a New Understanding of Life on Earth

“In 2020, researchers found that parasitic plants can read this changing light ratio to know who or what is nearby. In a lab, parasitic dodder vine seedlings appeared to detect the size, shape, and distance of neighboring plants, and used that information to decide which plants to grow toward and parasitize. This makes sense; dodders don’t photosynthesize. As seedlings, they have very little time to locate a good host before they run out of their built-in supply of energy. And once a parasitic vine commits to winding around a host plant, their fates are forever entwined too. Choosing the right one quickly is an absolute must. Growing blindly in a random direction would be disastrous much of the time. To the researchers’ surprise, the dodder’s assessment of red light ratios appeared to be exquisitely fine-grain. In the lab, they used a combination of far-red LED arrays and real plants to set up tests; when given the option of LEDs arranged to resemble light passing through a grass-shaped plant and another resembling the body of a branched plant, the seedlings chose the direction of the “branched” one (dodders can’t grow on grasses). They also chose to grow toward the nearer of any two same-sized plants, even if the difference in distance was only four centimeters. It’s not a stretch to say that this parasitic plant can, in this basic way, see its host—or at least the size and shape of it.”
― Zoë Schlanger, The Light Eaters: How the Unseen World of Plant Intelligence Offers a New Understanding of Life on Earth

“I think the plants are primary organisms, and we are the secondary ones. We are fully dependent on them. Without them, we would not be able to survive,” Baluška says. “The opposite situation would not be so drastic for them.”
― Zoë Schlanger, The Light Eaters: How the Unseen World of Plant Intelligence Offers a New Understanding of Life on Earth

“Later, the genomics revolution made it possible to see just how impactful touch is to plants on a deeper level. Peering at the genes of Arabidopsis thaliana, a weedy plant in the mustard family and the lab rat of the plant biology world, researchers saw that touch quietly triggered such a dramatic response in their hormones and gene expression that it could substantially inhibit their growth. They stroked the arabidopsis with soft paintbrushes, and then analyzed the plants’ genetic responses. Within thirty minutes of being touched, 10 percent of the plant’s genome was altered. Clearly, the plant was reorganizing its priorities to deal with the disturbance, and rerouting energy away from the hard work of getting taller. Touched multiple times, arabidopsis cut its upward growth rate by as much as 30 percent, just as Jaffe had found years before.”
― Zoë Schlanger, The Light Eaters: How the Unseen World of Plant Intelligence Offers a New Understanding of Life on Earth

“Karban thought the usual view of plants at the whims of their environment couldn’t be right. He’d come up studying cicadas, which lay their eggs in trees. When the larvae hatch, they drop to the ground, burrow into the tree’s roots, and stay there for seventeen years, sucking its sap. To the tree, it’s a huge nuisance to have all that nutrition leak out of its lower parts before reaching its upper ones. As a young scientist, Karban read a paper by pioneering cicada researcher JoAnn White, who discovered that some trees were able to locate the place on their branch where the cicada eggs sat and grow a callus around them, suffocating them to death before they could hatch.”
― Zoë Schlanger, The Light Eaters: How the Unseen World of Plant Intelligence Offers a New Understanding of Life on Earth

“Bose began experiments on vegetables. He attached electric probes to various vegetables, and claimed to record a “death spasm” in the form of a spike in electrical activity. He hooked a cabbage to a voltmeter in front of the playwright George Bernard Shaw, who was reportedly horrified to witness the electrical “convulsion” of the cabbage as it was dropped in boiling water. Shaw, it must be said, was a vegetarian.”
― Zoë Schlanger, The Light Eaters: How the Unseen World of Plant Intelligence Offers a New Understanding of Life on Earth

“the scent of cut grass is the chemical equivalent of a plant’s scream.”
― Zoë Schlanger, The Light Eaters: How the Unseen World of Plant Intelligence Offers a New Understanding of Life on Earth

“Nature is not a puzzle waiting to be put together, or a codex waiting to be deciphered. Nature is chaos in motion. Biological life is a spiraling diffusion of possibilities, fractal in its profusion. Every organism, and certainly every plant, has ricocheted out of another fragment of the evolutionary web of green leafy things to variate further.”
― Zoë Schlanger, The Light Eaters: How the Unseen World of Plant Intelligence Offers a New Understanding of Life on Earth

“In a paper titled "Broadening the Definition of a Nervous System to Better Understand the Evolution of Plants and Animals," Llinás and Sergio Miguel-Tomé, a colleague at the University of Salamanca, basically argue that it makes no sense to define a nervous system as something only animals can have rather than defining it as a physiological system that could be present in other organisms in a different form.
Defining it phylogenetically-meaning assigning it only to one portion of the tree of life-ignores the very real force of convergent evolution, where organisms separately evolved similar systems to deal with similar challenges. It happens all the time in evolution; a classic example is wings. Flight evolved separately in birds, bats, and insects, to very similar effect. Eyes are another example; the eye lens has evolved separately several times.”
― Zoë Schlanger, The Light Eaters: How the Unseen World of Plant Intelligence Offers a New Understanding of Life on Earth

“There is something decidedly queer in all of this—the orchids and aspens and strawberries and antplants and ginkgoes—a sense of sensual entanglement that disregards binaries, runs across the species boundary, and almost gleefully defies heteronormative modes of reproduction. This lens might also help us escape the idea that everything in nature is a battle, with a clear winner. Sometimes it may be an improvisation, or a collaboration, or something else entirely. WHEN”
― Zoë Schlanger, The Light Eaters: How the Unseen World of Plant Intelligence Offers a New Understanding of Life on Earth

“Earlier, when I’d read a letter by Baluška and Mancuso in an issue of Trends in Plant Science, I nearly fell off my chair. It was titled, “Vision in Plants via Plant-Specific Ocelli?” That innocent question mark did nothing to soften the implications. Ocelli is a science term for simple eyes, and Baluška and Mancuso were asking if plants might have them. It included a mention of boquila, which was discovered by Gianoli two years prior to be able to mimic the shape and feel of the leaves of other plants, right down to their color, vein pattern, and texture.”
― Zoë Schlanger, The Light Eaters: How the Unseen World of Plant Intelligence Offers a New Understanding of Life on Earth

“At the time of my visit, Finnish evolutionary ecologist Aino Kalske, Japanese chemical ecologist Kaori Shiojiri, and Cornell chemical ecologist André Kessler had recently found that goldenrods that live in peaceful areas without much threat from predators will issue chemical alarm calls that are incredibly specific—decipherable only to their close kin—on the rare occasion they are attacked. But goldenrods in more hostile territory signal to their neighbors using chemical phrases easily understood by all the goldenrod in the area, not just their biological kin. Instead of using coded whisper networks, these goldenrod broadcast the threat over loudspeaker, so to speak. It is the first time research has confirmed that these sort of chemical communications are beneficial not only to the plant receiving them but also to the sender.* When times are truly tough, you don’t want to be left standing in a field alone when it’s over, if you’re a plant. There’ll be no one to mate with, no one to help bring in pollinators. It’s the closest scientists have come to showing intentionality in plant communication: these are signals meant to be heard. And as we know, by some measures, intention is an indicator of intelligent behavior.”
― Zoë Schlanger, The Light Eaters: How the Unseen World of Plant Intelligence Offers a New Understanding of Life on Earth

“ecological models for what is supposed to happen. “You don’t need competition to explain this,” he says. “It doesn’t mean competition isn’t there, but we can explain all of our patterns without ever once talking about competition.”
― Zoë Schlanger, The Light Eaters: How the Unseen World of Plant Intelligence Offers a New Understanding of Life on Earth