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Well, guess we’ll just have to starve, then.
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We can still eat single celled protein! Mmm, yeasty!
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I must be a plant
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“Are you going to tell me,” said Arthur, “that I shouldn’t have green salad?”
“Well,” said the animal, “I know many vegetables that are very clear on that point. Which is why it was eventually decided to cut through the whole tangled problem and breed an animal that actually wanted to be eaten and was capable of saying so clearly and distinctly. And here I am.”
It managed a very slight bow.
“Glass of water please,” said Arthur.
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Is anyone else most surprised by the fact that plants apparently have noisemaking structures?
I’d read about chemical emissions in response to damage; but I was not under the impression that plants were incapable of synthesizing chemicals(and, in the most basic implementation, basically anything with a cell wall and/or membrane has some fairly strong positions on inside chemistry and outside chemistry, so you get a more or less automatic ‘cell walls breached!’ signal thanks to the inside chemistry rushing out); but making noises was not on my list of expected capabilities.
Since this happens up in the ultrasonic range I wonder if there are any areas where we aren’t currently aware that noise pollution is freaking the local plant life out. You aren’t going to get people calling in noise complaints over 80KHz sound; so there wouldn’t necessarily be any incentive to abate it; but if plants are using acoustic signals and some switchmode power supply is making a constant “I am being devoured by locusts unto death!” signal that might perturb them a bit.
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Screaming internally: “This is what my career has come to.”
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After decades, that scene still gives me chuckles.
That’s what you get for chewing the scenery on some alien planet.
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“If trees could scream, would we be so cavalier about cutting them down? We might, if they screamed all the time, for no good reason.”
- Jack Handy
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In truth, I think Harris did an excellent job being a broccoli stalk in that episode… an episode that, as a little kid, I despised… but which I find hilarious now. He was known for writing his own lines, and I’d bet he ‘wrote’ the broccoli’s lines, actually taken from an obscure poem that Harris likely was exposed to as a child. He was quite erudite. 
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There is no reason to think that the plants can detect these sounds, so ultrasonic noise pollution bothering plants is unlikely. There are plenty of animals that can hear ultrasound though. Bats, insects, frogs, etc. which no doubt are bothered by high frequency noise pollution.
The proposed mechanism is vibration of the xylem due to cavitation (basically, air bubbles forming in the tubes that bring water up from the roots), so it is likely an unintentional sound.
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April Fools.
I read the paper.
There’s no mention of the mechanism by which the plants produce sound. It’s a physical vibration.
Plants are largely in capable of the voluntary physical movement required to produce those vibrations.
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Name checks out.
I liked the NYTimes article title, “This is What it Sounds Like, When Plants Cry”
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Obligs:
“If trees could scream, would we be so cavalier about cutting them down? We might, if they screamed all the time, for no good reason.”
― Jack Handy
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In a different scene, but relevant.
"No, don’t move,” he added as Arthur began to uncurl himself, “you’d better be prepared for the jump into hyperspace. It’s unpleasantly like being drunk.”
“What’s so unpleasant about being drunk?”
“You ask a glass of water"
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You know, for an urban first-worlder, eating fresh vegetables is probably the most readily available way to satisfy one’s primal urge to kill. Sure, if you have a steak it means an animal had to be killed, but that probably happened far away, some time ago, and with your indirect involvement only via the vague dynamics of market demand. Whereas a head of lettuce - that is still alive when you buy it. Perhaps it even comes with its roots intact in a little pot - you could plant it and it may yet thrive, but you don’t. Its leaves are still busy photosynthesising within the fine structure of their chloroplasts right until you crush them with your teeth. It’s brutal.
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