Plants are more sensitive than they might seem. Although they stay in one spot, they are monitoring and reacting to the world around them; in some cases, they even remember the stresses and stimuli of the past. They’re also aware of the community of plants around them, and in a new paper, published in PLOS ONE, a team of scientists shows how plants monitor underground signals and react to the stresses their neighbors experience, too. How do plants react, they wondered, when they know a nearby plant has been touched?

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You could think of it sort of like gossip: One plant warns the others that it’s been touched and that there’s competition over in its direction. But [ lead author Velemir Ninkovic, a senior lecturer at the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences] says he tends to think the right analogy is listening.

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When Ninkovic first started working in this field, he says, he was skeptical of the idea of plant-plant communication. But over the past several years, a growing body of evidence has shown that plants are paying much more attention, in their particular plant way, to the world around them than we ever realized.

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