Plants, like animals, have a 24 hour 'body-clock' known as the circadian rhythm. This biological timer gives plants an innate ability to measure time, even when there is no light - they don't simply respond to sunrise, for example, they know it is coming and adjust their biology accordingly.
Plants keep track of the time of day with a circadian clock. This internal clock is synchronized with solar time every day using sunlight, temperature, and other cues, similar to the biological clocks present in other organisms.
Living organisms, such as animals, cyanobacteria, and plants, have an internal endogenous oscillator known as the circadian clock, which predicts the alteration during the light and dark cycles.
Many plants exhibit a strong circadian rhythm (see also Chronobiology), and a few have been observed to open at quite a regular time, but the accuracy of such a clock is diminished because flowering time is affected by weather and seasonal effects.
The circadian clock allows a plant to match the utilisation of carbohydrate reserves to the duration of the night. In short, this means is that the plant is ensuring that it has enough food to survive the night. This control is necessary for maintaining plant productivity.
Although plants do not sleep in the same way that humans do, they do have more and less active times and they have circadian rhythms—internal clocks that tell them when it is night and when it is day. And like many people, plants are less active at night. When the Sun comes up, however, they awake to the day.
While at night, the plants uptake oxygen and release carbon dioxide, which is called respiration. However, some plants can uptake carbon dioxide during the night as well because of their ability to perform a type of photosynthesis called Crassulacean Acid Metabolism (CAM).
Truth be told, many plants release carbon dioxide at night. But there's nothing to worry about. Really really small amounts of carbon dioxide won't be a problem for humans. A few plants will never produce enough to be harmful, maybe unless you are sleeping in some sort of a jungle… Plus, it's all about plant selection.
In plant biology, plant memory describes the ability of a plant to retain information from experienced stimuli and respond at a later time. For example, some plants have been observed to raise their leaves synchronously with the rising of the sun. Other plants produce new leaves in the spring after overwintering.
Moreover, plants are also capable of a refined recognition of self and non-self and this leads to territorial behavior. This new view considers plants as conscious, information-processing organisms with complex communication throughout the individual plant, including feelings and perception of pain, among other things.
Plants may lack brains, but they have a nervous system, of sorts. And now, plant biologists have discovered that when a leaf gets eaten, it warns other leaves by using some of the same signals as animals.
So plants have a day and night cycle. They're less active at night, and they seem to use that time to rest and recover, which is kind of like sleep, but it's also definitely not sleep.
“Yes, plants can suffer from jet lag. If you were to fly a plant from China to London, that plant's circadian rhythm would be temporarily incorrect for the time zone.
Both animals and plants are aware, and given the relation between awareness and consciousness, plants can be described as conscious organisms.
Evidence suggests that plants can behave intelligently by exhibiting the ability to learn, make associations between environmental cues, engage in complex decisions about resource acquisition, memorize, and adapt in flexible ways.
A new study out of the La Trobe Institute for Agriculture and Food has found that most plants are extremely sensitive to touch, and even a light touch can significantly stunt their growth, reports Phys.org.
The truth is that plants are by no means insensitive to their environment: although they lack eyes, ears, tongues, noses or brains, they nevertheless see, hear, taste, smell and much more, and like us make decisions accordingly.
Plants, the book revealed, can make their own trace elements through fusion, just like the sun. More, they can recognize people. If someone committed a crime in front of them — plants' fear could be measured with a simple lie detector test. And the book took it one step further, claiming that plants are conscious.
Some people worry that plants in the bedroom will cause carbon dioxide (CO2) poisoning, but this is an urban myth. It's true that when you turn off the light, the plant no longer has a source of energy, and so photosynthesis stops. This means that it no longer takes in CO2.
In this dark environment, plants start to respire. Simply put, they begin to release carbon dioxide into the air around them. Having a person sleeping next to you is more dangerous than keeping plants in your bedroom. Even though this theory seemingly had some give in the past, it's nothing more than a myth.
A Plant in the bedroom can absorb harmful gases through the pores in their leaves, filtering and cleaning the air you breathe every day. Not only do bedroom plants have many health benefits, but they also add a nice touch of decor and bright energy to any indoor space.
Plants thrive when they listen to music that sits between 115Hz and 250Hz, as the vibrations emitted by such music emulate similar sounds in nature. Plants don't like being exposed to music more than one to three hours per day. Jazz and classical music seems to be the music of choice for ultimate plant stimulation.
In a strict sense, plants do not grow faster in the dark; they grow slower. However, plants seem to grow faster in insufficient light due to rapid cell elongation. In other words, they don't grow faster, they simply stretch.
Plants, shrubs and trees use sunlight for photosynthesis during the daytime, but at night they need darkness to regenerate a key compound - phytochrome. Nighttime lighting can reduce vegetation's ability to properly create this compound.