Many plants move their leaves/flowers so that they follow the sun across the sky. Also, climbing plants reach out “tentacles” and move around until they find something to grab on to to keep climbing. How do plants do that without muscles or a brain?
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For all things to be classed as living, they must be able to have sensitivity and control (among other things).
To live plants need to photosynthesise which requires photons from any source of light.
The leaves in plants is where photosynthesis mostly takes place so they have ‘light receptors’.
The plant is able to alter the texture of the stem or leaf causing it to face towards the source of light.
Plants also have a hormone called Auxin which causes plant cells to get longer. When the sun shines on the parts with Auxin, the hormone moves to the shadier side meaning that side grows faster. This causes the plant to grow towards the sunlight.
The process of plants following the sun through the day is called heliotropism. The process of growing towards light is called phototropism.
Hope this helps 🙂
They do this by elongating the cells of the stem on the side that is farthest from the light. This type of light-oriented growth is called phototropism.
The general chemical is something called auxin which governs growth and react to sunlight meaning that levels of auxin vary and the plant bends towards the sun.
With climbing plants grabing onto ‘things’, like the pea or the passion fruit vine do, the shoot that garbs onto ‘things’ does so by the rubbing on the ‘things’ slowing the growth on that side of the shoot making it curl around the ‘thing’
there are many plants that grow in the wild, so there’s a lot of competition. the plants that point towards the sun will absorb more sunlight, and cast shade on other competing seeds.
over time, plants developed a complex series of chemical signals to grow more cells on one side, because plant cells are not elastic. they have a hard cell wall, so any in-grown deformation is permanent
As to how plant move without a brain: a creeping plant sorta naturally rotates around as it grows, which makes it more likely to eventually hit something. And the rotational motion then continues around the thing it hit to grab on. There’s are some good time lapse videos like this: https://youtu.be/5NvlkEqMtVY
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