Survival of the Fittest - Plants vs Humans

By Samrat Channa

The Happening (2008)   

Humans, Animals, Aliens. Hollywood has managed to villainize all of these beings and now with the movie The Happening, plants have seemed to enter the picture! Taking on a twist to the genre of horror movies, the film explores the idea of a thriller through not just biological elements but through imagery that often isn’t seen as eerie or threatening. Before watching this movie, plants were the furthest away from the grim reality of death in my ignorant mind. In fact, I envisioned them to be the most defenseless creatures of all! However, through probably the most shocking class during the whole semester, I have come to realize that these leafy beings seem to pack a bigger punch than one might realize.

Natural Selection

So why did the plants feel the need to defend themselves in the film? We can trace it back to the concept of evolution and natural selection first introduced by Charles Darwin in his book ‘On the Origins of Species’. To define Natural Selection, it is the struggle to exist and battle the rest of the organisms to survive, while maintaining variants in the characteristics to adapt to the changing environment is the gist of it (Gildenhuys, 2019).
Well, you might be wondering what plants have to do with this and how this even relates to the movie in the first place. According to the Director and writer of the movie, Night Shyamalan, the premise is based on the attempt of flora to counter the growing environmental destruction caused by human beings by releasing neurotoxins that send a signal to the brain to self-destruct, or to put it simply, commit suicide (Hart, 2017).

Retrieved: https://humanoriginproject.com/what-is-natural-selection/

The movie explores the concept of natural selection but instead of extending traits and focusing on defense as most of us would expect plants to do, we see them switch over to the offensive side, a concept that might seem nonsensical, yet nature proves that we cannot get comfortable with our limited knowledge yet again.

Defense 101

We are only slightly aware of the technique’s plants use to defend themselves. While the external, physical defenses might resonate with us well, plants are an amalgamation of various physical and chemical characteristics and features to protect themselves against the hundreds of threats they face every day, ranging from bacteria to herbivores or people like you and me who consume and destroy them every day. To name a few, the thorns on a rose might impede it from being plucked or the bark of the tree being protected by lignin would result in it being harder to cut down or chewed through (Ted-Ed, 2017). Evolution goes hand in hand with these characteristics as they’ve been developed throughout history to prevent the species from being wiped out through extinction and a lack of biodiversity. To make matters worse and perhaps, dire, the possibility of ‘The Happening’ happening in real life is just a few lucky evolutionary steps away. Taking the sadism of the tomato plant, for example, ecologists at the University of Wisconsin conducted an experiment where they put a few caterpillars in with a tomato plant and used a chemical to activate the plant's immune system (Klein, 2017). The caterpillars instead of using the plant to nutrition themselves began eating each other! This really goes to prove that the writers at The Happening round table were actually not that far away from reality.

  

https://www.pinterest.com/pin/835347430863933064/ 

Fun Facts

If you forgot plants are living creatures, take the Mimosa Pudica for example, responds to the stimulus by closing its leaves. The response is eerily instantaneous due to the accumulated water that is released through the cells to startle any nearby predator (The Editors of Encyclopedia Britannica, 2017).

Plants and Us

Knowing what you know now, plants are incredibly complex species that have evolved to use elements of nature like water to change their physical appearance, the wind to spread signals of danger to nearby plants, or attract insects to defeat their enemies for them. To continue on with the movie, the plot seems more and more viable the more one ponders over it. The science teacher using ‘The Scientific Method’ (which u can read about in my previous blog here) narrows down the strange occurrences to taking place exclusively near parks and signaled through winds. After figuring out the premise, he comes to the conclusion that the plants are releasing a chemical compound that is affecting the neurological reaction in humans to attacking themselves, a process that the tomato plant also proved is achievable. While the critics may disagree, science approves that plants might perceive the growing pollution, deforestation, and impending extinction of their species or the Earth as a threat and set out to fend for themselves. The movie portrayed the attack as a threat or warning, not exclusive to a geographical location in America according to the scientist on the news, which was later proven to be correct as the attack started at a park in Paris in the last scene.

To conclude, humans have relied on plants since our beginning yet their safety is reduced down as Global Warming. Plants should be seen as creatures that live and breathe like we do; their protection is made a priority that needs to be reflected in everyday life. We have coined the phrase ‘connecting with nature’ yet the very reality of nature connected to us and our future is not thought of.

Retrieved: https://giphy.com/explore/house-plants

References:

Gildenhuys, P. (2019, September 25). Natural Selection (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy). The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/natural-selection/#Bib
Hart, H. (2017, June 3). The Happening: Science Fact or Science Fiction? Wired, https://www.wired.com/2008/06/the-happening-s/
Murch, S. J. (2006). Neurotransmitters, neuroregulators, and neurotoxins in plants. In Communication in Plants (pp. 137-151). Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg.
Ted-Ed. (2017, August 28). The amazing ways plants defend themselves - Valentin Hammoudi [Video]. YouTube, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hja0SLs2kus
The Editors of Encyclopedia Britannica. (2017, April 6). Sensitive plant | botany. Encyclopedia Britannica, https://www.britannica.com/plant/sensitive-plant
Klein, J. (2017, July 11). The Very Hungry Caterpillars That Turned to Cannibalism. The New York Times, https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/11/science/tomato-plants-caterpillars-cannibalism.html