Plant Behavior (New Idea for Somebody to Follow Up On)

Plant Behavior**

An oxymoron?  Or just something that has fallen between the cracks of botany.  Botany has traditionally been, and still is, a science limited to three dimensions (or even two dimensions in the case of herbarium botanists!) as indeed zoology was up until as recently as Konrad Lorenz, Niko Tinbergen, and others whose codification of animal behaviors gave birth to a whole new science—ethology.

The only reason plant “behavior” has been not only neglected but never even considered as a possibility—oxymoronic, in fact—is that it is so SLOW, and maybe secondarily that it is also pretty SIMPLE.  Indeed, to the uncritical eye, movement is one of the major properties—possibly the major property—that distinguishes animal from vegetable and mineral.

Time-lapse photography comes closest to giving dramatic evidence that plants actually have something you could call behavior; they don’t just sit there, they do things, if only grow.*  but even that is a pretty amazing and complex thing—something most inanimate objects have yet to figure out. (By the way, are plants classed with “animate” or “inanimate” objects?)

Nor do plants only grow, they also do things like: turn to follow the sun; close their leaves at night (or occasionally to escape injury, or even to catch flies!); droop or shrink when they get dry; change color in various ways, for various reasons; open and close their stomata to regulate gas and water exchange; conjure up flowers and seeds like rabbits out of hats; dehisce seed-pods and otherwise send their progeny out into the world, sometimes in ways sudden and violent enough to impress even us fast-moving animals (e.g. popweed, impatiens, broom? etc.).

Of all the ways to describe/study/compare plant taxa, this (now I refer mainly to development, especially the early stages) is the only one that has been more-or-less totally ignored, if only because nobody ever thinks about it.  It also requires more work than the other approaches, because it alone requires that you GROW the plant and observe it closely through its whole life, from seed to seed.

The most rudimentary kind of botanical description is the two-dimensional, herbarium kind (the universal and until recently almost only “scientific” approach to botany.  Next best is the 3-D kind of description (of a whole, live plant), which adds to the above a number of supplementary, sometimes crucial bits of information like:  the plant’s growth form or “habit” (i.e. erect or prostrate or ascending, etc.), the colors of its various parts, especially the flowers, and a few other things like flower and foliage scents (another nearly universally neglected aspect of plant description).

The next big step, the next level of sophistication in describing our plant is to study it in its natural environment, e.g. what are its habitat requirements, what is its natural range, does it grow singly or in colonies, when does it come into flower etc. (phenology is the only widely recognized facet of plant “behavior”).

All the above, or usually a rudimentary subset of it, is what you will find in any of the many thousands of published descriptions of plant species—a more-or-less grainy snapshot of a mature plant.  What you won’t find is anything about what the plant does, or when, or in what sequence, or under what conditions, or about the early development of the plant from germination to maturity (cotyledons, for example, are often very distinctive from species to species).  [Insert something here about the difference between a single photo of a person and a series of photos from babyhood to maturity and beyond, plus a C.V.]  

The major recent contributions to plant (and animal) systematics are a number of techniques for looking at the plant, as it were, from the inside out, that is by studying the plant at the molecular/genetic level—botany dressed in a lab coat.

If we can add to this the consistently heretofore-neglected descriptive gaps regarding early stages (and late stages) of development and other loosely “behavioral” information, we will be getting a lot closer to being able to paint a full picture of our plant.

Note to ?  Any time you see a verb applied to a plant, you can infer some behavior on the part of the plant (e.g. dehisce, climb, bloom, spread, imbibe, germinate, produce . . .).

[Insert somewhere a human analogy of a black-and-white photo vs. a color photo of the person vs. a series from birth to death in the person’s context/environment plus “behavior” info—what the person does and how he changes from birth to death—a not inconsequential aspect of our lives, so why deny or ignore this aspect of plants?

*The stages of growth and development and phenology (also aspects of ecology) actually constitute the bulk of what I am loosely calling “behavior”; in other words I am (stupidly, no doubt) combining “behavior” in the narrow, zoological sense with DEVELOPMENT.

**The term will be used here very loosely: basically, whatever a plant DOES is its “behavior”.