It seems like Roald Dahl may have been onto something after all: if you hurt a plant, it screams.
Well, sort of. Not in the same way you or I might scream. Rather, they emit popping or clicking noises in ultrasonic frequencies outside the range of human hearing that increase when the plant becomes stressed.
This, according to a study published in 2023, could be one of the ways in which plants communicate their distress to the world around them.
"Even in a quiet field, there are actually sounds that we don't hear, and those sounds carry information. There are animals that can hear these sounds, so there is the possibility that a lot of acoustic interaction is occurring," said evolutionary biologist Lilach Hadany of Tel Aviv University in Israel.
Read more at Science Alert