eli5: how do climbing plants “know” where to “reach” places where they can grab onto to grow up a surface? Ex: peas have those little green string “fingers” that they wrap around trellis in a garden.

Question

eli5: how do climbing plants “know” where to “reach” places where they can grab onto to grow up a surface? Ex: peas have those little green string “fingers” that they wrap around trellis in a garden.

In: Biology

Answer 1

As the tendrils of these plans grow they rotate in progressively bigger circles until they make contact with something. After this point they will do their best to attack themselves to it and secure their grip. You should be able to find videos on YouTube of time lapses of plants doing this.

I hope this helped!