My Science School

The idea seems crazy, but scientific experiments have shown that some plants really do behave differently when they are exposed to sound especially music.

Ancient legends from India say that the god Krishna used music to make plants grow. Modern experiments in India seem to confirm that plants like music. In the early 1960s a scientist working in a university near Madras made an astonishing discovery. He found that playing the violin or playing Indian music produced plants that were taller and stronger than plants that grew without music. So he tried his experiment on rice growing in paddy fields. He played them Indian music, and the rice plants loved it. They grew strong and healthy and produced masses of rice. Harvests went up between twenty-five and sixty per cent!

A few years later another researcher working in Denver in the USA went a stage further. She experimented with different types of music to find out which her plants preferred. It turned out that the plants were terribly conservative. Rock music, especially acid rock, had them leaning as far from it as they could. They also drank much more water than plants played other music. In one experiment all the plants died when a really heavy number was played.

On the other hand, they adored the classics. An identical group of plants could not get enough of the Beethoven, Brahms, Schubert and Haydn she played them. Some plants burst into flower, others leaned right over to the hi-fi speakers. The experiments continued. Bach proved to be a big hit. So did jazz. But the number one spot again belonged to Indian music. When she played this the plants were leaning at 60° angles towards the speakers. Krishna was right. Plants may not be able to hear as we do, but they have got very set tastes when it comes to music.

 

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When it comes to stealthy hunting, the chameleon takes some beating. This strange-looking lizard moves with slow, deliberate action and has a number of remarkable skills. It can catch and swallow its prey in a fraction of a second - one twenty-fifth, to be precise. It can look in two directions at once. And most celebrated of all, it can change its colour and markings to blend in with the background. This makes it almost impossible to see.

To do this the chameleon has special colour cells in its skin. It can look more brown or green, lighter or darker whatever is needed to match the surrounding foliage.

The chameleon's camouflage makes it very difficult to spot, but it also has amazing eyesight of its own. It can move its eyes independently and in any direction. So while one eye is scanning upwards in search of food, the other can be watching out for insects moving below.

It is even tougher for an insect that a chameleon does spot. Its long sticky tongue, sometimes as long as its body, can shoot with deadly accuracy and incredible speed. Insects can be caught and whipped back into the chameleon's mouth in almost less time than it takes us to blink.

 

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If there is one thing a nettle sting does, it makes you try very hard to avoid being stung a second time. This is just what nature intends. The nettle's sting is its means of protection. It stops animals trying to eat the plant.

If you look at a stinging nettle leaf under a microscope, you will see that the small hairs covering it are really tiny tubes. These are filled with poison. They have brittle tips that snap off at the slightest touch, leaving a jagged edge. This can easily penetrate skin so that the poison can get inside it. You probably do not need reminding that stinging nettle poison can create a prickling feeling that lasts for several hours. So you would have to be pretty desperate to sting yourself deliberately, but Roman soldiers are said to have rubbed nettles on their bodies in cold climates to try to keep warm.

 

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It is not to prevent it sneezing and scaring away its supper. No polar bears are cleverer than that. They are very cunning hunters.

In summer polar bears stick to a largely vegetarian diet. When the plants they feed on die off or are iced over in winter, they switch to eating meat by catching seals and fish. There is not a lot of cover in the Arctic, where polar bears live. And there is seldom enough to hide a huge bear up to three metres long. Being white helps a polar bear blend in to the background. But it is not all white. Its nose is black. So to hide this from their prey, polar bears have been seen holding paws over their noses to cover the one black spot that might give them away.

 

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The flowers of most plants produce a sweet scent and we are very grateful to them for creating the lovely smells that fill our gardens. Much as we enjoy them, the scents are not meant for our benefit. Plants produce them to attract far more important visitors insects, particularly bees.

When insects crawl inside flowers to sip their nectar, they pick up pollen as well. As they move from flower to flower, the insects transfer the pollen. This ensures that the plants are pollinated and will produce seeds from which other plants will grow the following year.

Not all plants attract insects with sweet scents. Some, like the suitably named Stinkhorn fungus, produce awful smells. This has a smell like rotting flesh to attract large flies which carry away its, spores to produce more plants.

The Stinking Corpse lily smells just as bad, as you might imagine. It needs to attract flies to pollinate it. That is especially important for this tropical plant because it produces the world's largest flower, which can measure up to ninety centimetres across.

 

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All fish need oxygen to live - just as we do. But most fish use their gills to extract oxygen from water. So they do not breathe' air as such.

However, there seems to be an exception to every rule and in this case it is the lungfish of Australia, Africa and South America. As their name suggests, they can take oxygen from the air.

Lungfish are the last survivors of a group of animals that lived in an earlier period of the world's history. This was the time when animals started to move out of the water to live on land for the first time.

Today's lungfish live in dry parts of the world where the swamps which are their homes dry up in summer. When this happens they burrow into soft mud and breathe air until the rainy season brings water again. Some lungfish have survived for four years in this way.

 

Picture Credit : Google