Plant-Animal Communication
Plant-Animal Communication

Author: H. Martin Schaefer

Publisher: OUP Oxford

Published: 2011-04-07

Total Pages: 298

ISBN-13: 0191620971

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Communication is an essential factor underpinning the interactions between species and the structure of their communities. Plant-animal interactions are particularly diverse due to the complex nature of their mutualistic and antagonistic relationships. However the evolution of communication and the underlying mechanisms responsible remain poorly understood. Plant-Animal Communication is a timely summary of the latest research and ideas on the ecological and evolutionary foundations of communication between plants and animals, including discussions of fundamental concepts such as deception, reliability, and camouflage. It introduces how the sensory world of animals shapes the various modes of communication employed, laying out the basics of vision, scent, acoustic, and gustatory communication. Subsequent chapters discuss how plants communicate in these sensory modes to attract animals to facilitate seed dispersal, pollination, and carnivory, and how they communicate to defend themselves against herbivores. Potential avenues for productive theoretical and empirical research are clearly identified, and suggestions for novel empirical approaches to the study of communication in general are outlined.

Plant Sensing & Communication
Plant Sensing & Communication

Author: Richard Karban

Publisher: University of Chicago Press

Published: 2015-06-18

Total Pages: 251

ISBN-13: 022626484X

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

The news that a flowering weed—mousear cress (Arabidopsis thaliana)—can sense the particular chewing noise of its most common caterpillar predator and adjust its chemical defenses in response led to headlines announcing the discovery of the first “hearing” plant. As plants lack central nervous systems (and, indeed, ears), the mechanisms behind this “hearing” are unquestionably very different from those of our own acoustic sense, but the misleading headlines point to an overlooked truth: plants do in fact perceive environmental cues and respond rapidly to them by changing their chemical, morphological, and behavioral traits. In Plant Sensing and Communication, Richard Karban provides the first comprehensive overview of what is known about how plants perceive their environments, communicate those perceptions, and learn. Facing many of the same challenges as animals, plants have developed many similar capabilities: they sense light, chemicals, mechanical stimulation, temperature, electricity, and sound. Moreover, prior experiences have lasting impacts on sensitivity and response to cues; plants, in essence, have memory. Nor are their senses limited to the processes of an individual plant: plants eavesdrop on the cues and behaviors of neighbors and—for example, through flowers and fruits—exchange information with other types of organisms. Far from inanimate organisms limited by their stationary existence, plants, this book makes unquestionably clear, are in constant and lively discourse.

Communication in Plants
Communication in Plants

Author: František Baluška

Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media

Published: 2007-02-15

Total Pages: 450

ISBN-13: 3540285164

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Plant neurobiology is a newly emerging field of plant sciences. It covers signalling and communication at all levels of biological organization – from molecules up to ecological communities. In this book, plants are presented as intelligent and social organisms with complex forms of communication and information processing. Authors from diverse backgrounds such as molecular and cellular biology, electrophysiology, as well as ecology treat the most important aspects of plant communication, including the plant immune system, abilities of plants to recognize self, signal transduction, receptors, plant neurotransmitters and plant neurophysiology. Further, plants are able to recognize the identity of herbivores and organize the defence responses accordingly. The similarities in animal and plant neuronal/immune systems are discussed too. All these hidden aspects of plant life and behaviour will stimulate further intense investigations in order to understand the communicative plants in their whole complexity.

Vibrational Communication in Animals
Vibrational Communication in Animals

Author: Peggy S. M. Hill

Publisher: Harvard University Press

Published: 2008-05-30

Total Pages: 282

ISBN-13: 9780674027985

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

In creatures as different as crickets and scorpions, mole rats and elephants, there exists an overlooked channel of communication: signals transmitted as vibrations through a solid substrate. Peggy Hill summarizes a generation of groundbreaking work by scientists around the world on this long understudied form of animal communication. Beginning in the 1970s, Hill explains, powerful computers and listening devices allowed scientists to record and interpret vibrational signals. Whether the medium is the sunbaked savannah or the stem of a plant, vibrations can be passed along from an animal to a potential mate, or intercepted by a predator on the prowl. Vibration appears to be an ancient means of communication, widespread in both invertebrate and vertebrate taxa. Hill synthesizes in this book a flowering of research, field studies documenting vibrational signals in the wild, and the laboratory experiments that answered such questions as what adaptations allowed animals to send and receive signals, how they use signals in different contexts, and how vibration as a channel might have evolved. Vibrational Communication in Animals promises to become a foundational text for the next generation of researchers putting an ear to the ground.

The Language of Plants
The Language of Plants

Author: Monica Gagliano

Publisher: U of Minnesota Press

Published: 2017-04-25

Total Pages: 395

ISBN-13: 1452954127

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

The eighteenth-century naturalist Erasmus Darwin (grandfather of Charles) argued that plants are animate, living beings and attributed them sensation, movement, and a certain degree of mental activity, emphasizing the continuity between humankind and plant existence. Two centuries later, the understanding of plants as active and communicative organisms has reemerged in such diverse fields as plant neurobiology, philosophical posthumanism, and ecocriticism. The Language of Plants brings together groundbreaking essays from across the disciplines to foster a dialogue between the biological sciences and the humanities and to reconsider our relation to the vegetal world in new ethical and political terms. Viewing plants as sophisticated information-processing organisms with complex communication strategies (they can sense and respond to environmental cues and play an active role in their own survival and reproduction through chemical languages) radically transforms our notion of plants as unresponsive beings, ready to be instrumentally appropriated. By providing multifaceted understandings of plants, informed by the latest developments in evolutionary ecology, the philosophy of biology, and ecocritical theory, The Language of Plants promotes the freedom of imagination necessary for a new ecological awareness and more sustainable interactions with diverse life forms. Contributors: Joni Adamson, Arizona State U; Nancy E. Baker, Sarah Lawrence College; Karen L. F. Houle, U of Guelph; Luce Irigaray, Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, Paris; Erin James, U of Idaho; Richard Karban, U of California at Davis; André Kessler, Cornell U; Isabel Kranz, U of Vienna; Michael Marder, U of the Basque Country (UPV-EHU); Timothy Morton, Rice U; Christian Nansen, U of California at Davis; Robert A. Raguso, Cornell U; Catriona Sandilands, York U.

Animal Communication Networks
Animal Communication Networks

Author: P. K. McGregor

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2005-03-31

Total Pages: 682

ISBN-13: 9781139443678

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Most animal communication has evolved and now takes place in the context of a communication network, i.e. several signallers and receivers within communication range of each other. This idea follows naturally from the observation that many signals travel further than the average spacing between animals. This is self evidently true for long-range signals, but at a high density the same is true for short-range signals (e.g. begging calls of nestling birds). This book provides a current summary of research on communication networks and appraises future prospects. It combines information from studies of several taxonomic groups (insects to people via fiddler crabs, fish, frogs, birds and mammals) and several signalling modalities (visual, acoustic and chemical signals). It also specifically addresses the many areas of interface between communication networks and other disciplines (from the evolution of human charitable behaviour to the psychophysics of signal perception, via social behaviour, physiology and mathematical models).

Thus Spoke the Plant
Thus Spoke the Plant

Author: Monica Gagliano

Publisher: North Atlantic Books

Published: 2018-11-13

Total Pages: 177

ISBN-13: 1623172438

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

A research scientist’s fascinating study of plant communication reveals how we “have been misunderstanding plants, and ourselves, for all of history” (The Paris Review). “A compelling story of discovery . . . [that] will change the way you see the world”—for fans of The Hidden Life of Trees (Robin Wall Kimmerer, author of Braiding Sweetgrass) In this “phytobiography”—a collection of stories written in partnership with a plant—research scientist Monica Gagliano shares genuine first-hand accounts from her research into plant communication and cognition. By transcending the view of plants as the objects of scientific materialism, Gagliano encourages us to rethink plants as people—beings with subjectivity, consciousness, and volition, and hence having the capacity for their own perspectives and voices. The book draws on up-close-and-personal encounters with the plants themselves, as well as plant shamans, indigenous elders, and mystics from around the world and integrates these experiences with an incredible research journey and the groundbreaking scientific discoveries that emerged from it. Gagliano has published numerous peer-reviewed scientific papers on how plants have a Pavlov-like response to stimuli and can learn, remember, and communicate to neighboring plants. She has pioneered the brand-new research field of plant bioacoustics, for the first time experimentally demonstrating that plants emit their own 'voices' and, moreover, detect and respond to the sounds of their environments. By demonstrating experimentally that learning is not the exclusive province of animals, Gagliano has re-ignited the discourse on plant subjectivity and ethical and legal standing. This is the story of how she made those discoveries and how the plants helped her along the way.

Plant Minds
Plant Minds

Author: Chauncey Maher

Publisher: Taylor & Francis

Published: 2017-06-26

Total Pages: 144

ISBN-13: 1351730711

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

The idea that plants have minds can sound improbable, but some widely respected contemporary scientists and philosophers find it plausible. It turns out to be rather tricky to vindicate the presumption that plants do not have minds, for doing so requires getting clear about what plants can do and what exactly a mind is. By connecting the most compelling empirical work on plant behavior with philosophical reflection on the concept of minds, Plant Minds aims to help non-experts begin to think clearly about whether plants have minds. Relying on current consensus ideas about minds and plants, Chauncey Maher first presents the best case for thinking that plants do not have minds. Along the way, however, he unearths an idea at the root of that case, the idea that having a mind requires the capacity to represent the world. In the last chapter, he defends a relatively new and insightful theory of mind that rejects that assumption, making room for the possibility that plants do have minds, primarily because they are alive.

Animal Vocal Communication
Animal Vocal Communication

Author: Eugene S. Morton

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2017-04-06

Total Pages: 263

ISBN-13: 1107052254

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

This volume presents a new approach to conceptualizing animal vocal communication, with an emphasis on how receivers' responses influence signalling.

Animal Talk
Animal Talk

Author: Penelope Smith

Publisher: Simon and Schuster

Published: 2008-06-30

Total Pages: 195

ISBN-13: 1439123195

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

A straightforward, easy-to-understand book that teaches you how to directly communicate with animals. Animal Talk teaches you how to open the door to your animal friends’ hearts and minds without resorting to magic tricks or wishful thinking. Every creature can be reached through telepathic communication—from your tabby cat or cockatiel to the wasps that build nests in the eaves of your home or even the common flea—you just have to be open to the idea, and mind-to-mind communication will be in your grasp. In addition to an entire chapter devoted to teaching people how to develop mind-to-mind communication with animals, Animal Talk includes a discussion of freedom, control, and obedience, understanding behaviors from the animal’s point of view, how to handle upsets between animals, tips on nutrition for healthier pets, and the special relationship between animals and children.