It’s easy conceptually to understand when animals eat physical food matter, it adds to their own body mass as they grow.
But potted plants grow 2x, 3x, etc their mass while the only (seemingly) inputs are Sun, water and occasional plant food. The soil level doesn’t seem to change much either, so where is the “material” coming from to make the plant bigger? Is it just from what I mentioned, and is there an easy way to understand how those things transforms to plant mass?
Edit: Thanks for all the answers! It unexpectedly helped me understand how plants capture carbon from the air and “store” it physically. I have a new appreciation for my houseplants 🪴
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You may have heard the term ‘carbon based lifeform’ which refers to the fact that the majority of living tissue is made from carbon. When you see those chemical chain drawings in movies all of those lines represent carbon, to give you an idea of just how much of every molecule is made of carbon.
Plants are no different and are also mostly made from carbon, something that is abundant in the air. Plant leaves have microscopic holes all over them called stomata, and these organs are responsible for gas exchange in the plant, just like how humans breathe.
These stomata create a kind of vacuum to suck CO2 in from the air and that CO2 is used as the backbone or building block for all of the plants tissue.
In the 1600s Jon Von Helmont had the same question about potted plants so he ran an experiment. He weighed out soil in a massive pot and then planted a willow tree in it. A few years of growth later he weighed the soil and found it weighed pretty much the same as before, proving that most of a plants mass came from the air.
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