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Movement in Plants

© Narayan Dattatray Wadadekar

Most animals move and go from place to place. They are therefore, more attractive to most people. If you are in a lounge where some indoor plants are kept and also some fish in a tank, you will invariably find most people paying far more and longer attention to the fish than to the plants, however, lovely and exotic the plants may be.

That is the power of movement! You move and you get noticed. Bad if you are an army man hiding in a bush. Life is movement. There are a few exceptions to this rule - adult sponges (phylum - porifera) never go from place to place. Their larvae do. Sponge larvae have a coat of cilia and they swim. Plants do not locomote and move, or that is what we feel but some exceptional plants do. Generally plants grow and change so slowly that we hardly have the patience and eye for detail to notice the changes.

But some plants do change quicker and more conspicuously. Let's consider the movements in some such plants.

In 1917 an Indian, Jagadishchandra Bose (D.Sc. form London University, 1896) invented a sensitive instrument, the kreskograph, and established that plants have life. Plants react to rise and fall in temperature, touch, presence and direction of light, vibrations, chemicals, etc. Bose had designed very sensitive instruments that could record responses to some such stimuli.

A lotus flower opens as the day breaks and closes as darkness falls.

Desmodium gyrans, the famous Indian telegraph plant is an erect tropical Asian shrub which have one central and two small lateral leaflets. It is a leguminous plant. It belongs to the family Papilionaceae (included in Leguminosae). The lateral leaflets of this plant show spontaneous jerking up and down a dance under the influence of sunshine.

Darwin studied movements of the little leaflets of Desmodium gyrans, after borrowing a specimen from Sir Joseph .D. Hooker, the director with the famous, Royal Botanical Garden, Kew, England. Hooker had obtained the specimen from Sikkim, a state in the northeast India in the Himalayan ranges.

"The touch me not" plant Mimosa pudica, exhibits rapid leaf folding. The extent and speed of the response depends on how strong is the touch stimulus provided.

The "Venus fly trap", Dionea exhibits rapid trap closure when an insect comes in contact with it. See various types of movements of plants by visiting this interesting site - http://sunflower.bio.indiana.edu/~rhanga... and please do go to http://sunflower.bio.indiana.edu/~rhanga... for time-lapse movies on several different types of flowers unfolding stages of flower development, flower opening and ageing in flower.

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