Thank you, Graham, for this fascinating article on plant mimicry:
The vine Boquila trifoliolata can be found climbing up other plants in temperate rain forests of Chile and Argentina. The vine produces clusters of three leaflets, but the researchers noticed that the shape, size, color and orientation of the leaves weren’t always the same. They took a closer look at 45 vines growing on 12 different host tree species.
When a vine grew on a tree with thin, pointy leaves, its leaves were thin and pointy. On a tree with short, stubby leaves, B. trifoliolata’s leaves were short and stubby. The vine’s leaves indeed changed shape, color, size, thickness, angle and other attributes to match those of its host, the researchers found. Only when the vine was growing on its own or on a part of a tree without leaves did it show its “standard” leaves.
This mimicry pays off — vines that don’t grow on trees or attach themselves to supports that don’t have leaves are more likely to get eaten by small herbivores such as weevils and leaf beetles, the researchers found.
Just how the vine pulls off these impersonations isn’t clear, however. “We currently lack a mechanistic explanation for this unique phenomenon,” the scientists write. B. trifoliolata doesn’t even have to be touching its host to mimic it, so the vine can’t be sensing something directly from the host tree. But the trees might be emitting some kind of chemical signals that the vine picks up. Or there might be some kind of gene transfer going on, though the researchers admit that that hypothesis is even less plausible than the first.
End of quote.
Of course, the only place the scientists look is in the domain of the temporal or material for answers. It would shock them to know that all things have consciousness and we can all communicate with them, and they with one another. Simply attaching a lie detector (polygraph) to a plant leaf showed it was aware of the thoughts of someone looking to test it. When the tester THOUGHT of burning a leaf, the plants reaction was recorded violently on the lie detector. These experiments were done decades ago (I read about them in the 70’s) but, of course, are completely ignored within the scientific worldview.
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