Can plants hear?

The flower that listens for bees

The beach evening primrose has bowl-shaped yellow flowers, and in 2019 a team in Israel wondered if those bowls might work a bit like satellite dishes. They played flowers the recorded buzz of a flying bee, along with synthetic sounds at different pitches.

Within three minutes, flowers that “heard” the bee, or a sound at similar low frequencies, had nectar that was about 20% sweeter. Flowers exposed to silence or to high-pitched sounds didn’t change. Using a laser to measure tiny movements, the team found the petals actually vibrated in response to bee-like sounds, but not to the high ones.

From the plant’s point of view, it makes sense. Sweeter nectar the moment a pollinator is nearby could mean longer visits and more pollen moved between flowers.

The plant that knows chewing from wind

A few years earlier, researchers in Missouri recorded the tiny vibrations a caterpillar makes as it munches through a leaf. They played those vibrations back to Arabidopsis plants, a small weed scientists use the way medical researchers use mice.

When real caterpillars later started feeding, the “primed” plants pumped out more of their defence chemicals than plants that had sat in silence. Here’s the clever bit: vibrations from gentle wind or a leafhopper’s song didn’t have the same effect. The plants weren’t reacting to any old shaking. They responded to the pattern of chewing.

So is that really hearing?

It depends how strict you are. Plants have no ears and no brain, so they don’t hear the way we do. What they clearly can do is detect particular vibrations and respond in ways that help them survive.

“Sensing sound” is probably the fairest way to put it. It’s less poetic than “plants can hear”, but it’s still a remarkable thing for a flower to do.

Does playing music help my plants grow?

There’s no good evidence for it. The studies above used very specific sounds that mean something in a plant’s life, a pollinator or a predator. Studies on music are mostly small and poorly controlled, and none show a favourite genre. Our myth checks cover more popular plant claims like this one.