Comment on Atmospheric Slapping Tournament
AmbitiousProcess@piefed.social 5 hours agoApparently that’s the leading theory, but another is just that for reasons I am absolutely unqualified to explain, they sense light in specific ways that causes them to grow differently once they get close enough to another tree blocking some of the light there.
ToffeeIsForClosers@piefed.ca 5 hours ago
Like a houseplant angling toward the window light?
Slatlun@lemmy.ml 5 hours ago
A little, the stretching house plant demonstrates how plants can sense the direction light is coming from. They can also sense qualities of light. They can tell if light is filtered through other leaves, for instance. I would speculate that refected light also has a unique color (wavelength) distribution that a plant could sense and respond to
Semi_Hemi_Demigod@lemmy.world 4 hours ago
The reflected light of other leaves wouldn’t cause photosynthesis since it only has wavelengths that the chloroplasts reflect. They wouldn’t have any light to absorb, or at least a lot less.
I imagine it’s like expecting regular soda and getting diet.
AmbitiousProcess@piefed.social 3 hours ago
It seems as far as we can tell, trees can detect “far red” spectrum light, suspected to be done via phytochromes, and that spectrum of light is in higher quantities when closer to other tree leaves because it gets reflected off.
They detect that, and don’t grow as much in that direction since it would cause diminishing returns.