Why do animals fascinate us more than plants? – 05/04/2023 – Fundamental Science

Most of us have had this experience: going on a trail and on the way finding a mammal, a reptile, an unexpected bird. Despite having completed the route other times, that day was different: the animal made everything better. What almost none of the hikers notice, however, is the presence of trees, shrubs and small plants, often equally rare, as (or more?) important as the animals, and with different and interesting properties. It’s what we call botanical blindness.

When we see an animal in its natural environment, surrounded by plants, our brain highlights it, but transforms the plants into an amorphous green mass. It is understandable: we easily connect with animal behavior, while plants, with their slow growth, barely perceptible movements and very different body organization, seem almost alien. Director Steven Spielberg, in conversation with astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson, says he thought of the character ET as a plant, but ended up making changes to generate empathy, making him more like us.

Plants have an intricate relationship with human history. In the book plants and civilization, biologist Luiz Mors Cabral, a professor at the Fluminense Federal University, tells how they participated in some historical events. The discovery of the Amazon River (by the Europeans, as the native peoples had known it for a long time) occurred because explorers were looking for valuable “cinnamon trees”, although these plants did not exist in South America (there was only one whose bark smelled of cinnamon). In the 19th century, the massive migration from Ireland, especially to the United States — no wonder Boston has one of the biggest St. Patrick’s Day in the world, and the city’s basketball team is the Celtics — was motivated by a disease in potatoes, a tubercle that was then crucial to the diet of the Irish.

Already in Under the influence of plants, Michael Pollan suggests that coffee—caffeine, specifically, our nearly universal addiction—may have accelerated the Enlightenment and the development of modern science. As drinking water was difficult to store without being soon contaminated, beer and wine were consumed, as alcohol prevented the growth of bacteria. The adverse effect was the difficulty in facing a day at work and being well hydrated. The coffee habit, a boiled (and therefore sterile) beverage, offered an alternative, with the advantage of increasing energy and focus, and above all keeping individuals sober. Perhaps not by chance coffee shops British were places where various intellectual exponents of the time met to discuss ideas that contributed to the Enlightenment.

The relationship between plants and humans is even deeper. When we were hunter-gatherers, we ate game meat, roots, berries and grains in a varied diet. About 10,000 years ago, we started to save some grains and plant them near the camp, to facilitate harvesting. Soon we were selecting seeds from the plants that produced the most. So we started the Agricultural Revolution, and we became farmers. As Yuval Noah Harari explains in the book sapiens, the domestication of some plants allowed us to feed a greater number of people, albeit with more restricted nutrition. While we modified wheat, corn, rice, potato, tomato, pea, bean plants – until we produced new species, now dependent on us, and we on them –, we created villages and later cities. The domestication of plants took place between 10,000 and 3,000 years ago, and today it is plants that underpin our food security.

As we know, photosynthesis, also carried out by single-celled organisms on the surface of the oceans, is the hallmark of plants. It captures energy from the Sun and stores it in bonds between carbon atoms, derived from CO._two atmospheric. The stored energy is then used by the plants themselves to sustain their functioning and growth. Animals, in turn, as they do not carry out photosynthesis, need to “steal” energy. If this mechanism for capturing solar energy were to stop working, multicellular life would not survive—us humans included.

Photosynthesis also produces oxygen (O_two), essential for much of life on Earth. In fact, when this type of photosynthesis appeared on Earth about 2 billion years ago, the organisms using it were so successful that they multiplied rapidly, causing an excess of O_two In the atmosphere. The buildup led to mass extinction, and only those organisms that knew how to handle O_two survived. In other words, the Great Oxidation Event changed evolutionary history, and without it perhaps we, who depend on oxygen, would not be here.

Plants are at the heart of one of the major issues threatening the very civilization they helped to create. Climate change is largely caused by the massive use of fossil fuels. Their origin? Ancient photosynthesis. We are rapidly returning CO2 to the atmosphere_two captured in the biosphere over millions of years, causing the planet’s temperature to rise. In How Light Makes Life, biologist Raffael Jovine suggests that photosynthesis, nature’s most efficient carbon capture mechanism – and for the time being more efficient than artificial ones – is the solution. In other words: to combat climate change, we need more plants that live for many years, accumulate a lot of carbon in their bodies and are cheap. Did you think of a tree? So maybe you’ve lessened your botanical blindness. Plant, and contribute.

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Felipe Klein Ricachenevsky is a professor and researcher at the Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul.

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