Why Do Plants Wiggle? Scientists Solve Age-Old Mystery That Puzzled Charles Darwin
17th August 2024
For many humans, plants might seem stationary and even a little dull. But green things actually move a lot. If you watch a timelapse video of a sunflower seedling poking up from the soil, for example, it doesn’t just shoot straight up. Instead, as the sunflower grows, its crown spins in circles, twists into corkscrews and, in general, wiggles around—albeit very slowly.
Now, researchers co-led by Orit Peleg at CU Boulder and Yasmine Meroz at Tel Aviv University have discovered one role for these chaotic movements, also known as “circumnutations.” In greenhouse experiments and computer simulations, the group showed that sunflowers take advantage of circumnutations to search the environment around them for patches of sunlight.