Do Plants Scream? The Shocking Truth About 7 Sounds Plants Make
Scientists at Tel Aviv University recorded plants emitting ultrasonic clicks when stressed. We can finally answer: do plants scream — and what do they sound like?
For centuries, we assumed plants were silent. They grow, photosynthesize, and quietly survive — without a single peep. But in 2023, scientists at Tel Aviv University proved otherwise. So when curious minds ask: do plants scream? The honest answer is more surprising than science fiction. Plants don’t just make sounds — they emit different sounds depending on what kind of pain they’re experiencing.
A tomato plant under controlled lab conditions — the species used in the original Hadany & Yovel study.
1. Do plants scream? The 2023 discovery that changed botany
The Tel Aviv University study (Cell, 2023)
The breakthrough came from Professor Lilach Hadany’s lab at Tel Aviv University. In a paper published in the journal Cell, biologists demonstrated for the first time that stressed plants emit airborne ultrasonic clicks — sounds that travel through the air and can be detected from over a meter away.
This is the part that matters: previous studies had detected vibrations inside plants using contact sensors. But this was the first proof that the sounds escape into the air, where other living things might actually hear them. So when people ask “do plants scream,” what they’re really asking is whether plants make airborne sounds — and the answer is finally yes.
How they recorded a “silent” forest
The team used ultrasonic microphones — devices that capture frequencies up to 250 kilohertz, far above human hearing. They placed tomato and tobacco plants in a soundproof acoustic chamber, then later replicated the experiment in a noisier greenhouse.
Min frequency
Max frequency
when stressed
The popcorn-like clicks
The recordings revealed sharp, discrete clicks resembling popcorn popping — but at frequencies humans cannot hear. Stressed plants emitted dozens of these clicks per hour. Healthy, well-watered plants? Less than one per hour. The difference was so striking that a machine learning algorithm could identify, with high accuracy, whether a plant was thirsty, injured, or perfectly fine — based on sound alone.
Stressed plants emit roughly 30–40 ultrasonic clicks per hour. Healthy plants emit fewer than one. The difference isn’t subtle — it’s measurable, repeatable, and statistically significant across thousands of recordings.
2. What do stressed plants actually sound like?
Now that we know plants emit ultrasonic clicks, the natural question follows: what do they actually sound like? Since the original frequencies are between 40 and 80 kHz — far above human hearing — researchers had to lower the pitch to make the sounds audible to us. The result is, frankly, eerie.
Tomatoes vs tobacco: different “voices”
The Tel Aviv team focused primarily on tomato (Solanum lycopersicum) and tobacco (Nicotiana tabacum) plants. Each species had its own characteristic sound signature. Even more striking: each type of stress produced a distinct acoustic pattern. So when curious minds wonder do plants scream, the more accurate question becomes: in which dialect?
Dehydration vs injury: distinct acoustic signatures
The researchers stressed plants two ways: by withholding water for 5 days, and by cutting their stems. Both stressors produced sound — but different sounds. Dehydrated plants and cut plants had statistically distinct acoustic profiles, identifiable by trained machine learning models.
Click any plant state to simulate its acoustic signature. Real recordings from the Hadany lab are available here.
Other species the lab tested
While tomato and tobacco were the focus, the team also recorded corn, wheat, grape, and cactus plants — all of which emitted ultrasonic sounds when stressed. This suggests the phenomenon is widespread across the plant kingdom, not a quirk of two species.
3. Why we never heard plants until now
Here’s the irony: plants have likely been making these sounds for hundreds of millions of years. We never heard them because the frequencies are far above human hearing range. Humans top out around 16-20 kHz — plant clicks live at 40-80 kHz. We’d need ultrasonic equipment to detect them, and that technology only became cheap enough for research labs in the past decade.
40-80 kHz — beyond human hearing
To put this in perspective, dog whistles work around 23-46 kHz. Bats use frequencies up to 200 kHz for echolocation. Plant ultrasonic emissions overlap with the range that many bat species use to navigate their environment.
Cavitation: bubbles bursting in the xylem
What actually causes the clicks? The leading hypothesis is cavitation: when a plant is dehydrated or damaged, air bubbles form and burst inside its xylem (the water-transport tissue). Each burst creates a sharp ultrasonic pop. So when curious minds ask do plants scream, the mechanical answer is that they’re snapping their internal plumbing.
Why ultrasonic microphones changed everything
Early studies in the 1980s detected vibrations using sensors physically attached to plants. But that left an open question: do these vibrations escape into the air, or do they stay locked inside? The 2023 study answered that question definitively. Yes, plant sounds are airborne. Yes, other organisms could potentially hear them.
Vibrations through plant tissue have been recorded since the 1980s. But proving those vibrations traveled through the air — that they were real “sounds” in the meaningful sense — required ultra-sensitive microphones, soundproof chambers, and machine learning to filter background noise. The technology just caught up to the question.
4. Who’s listening? Insects, bats, and other plants
Even if plants don’t intentionally “speak,” organisms in their environment can almost certainly hear them. This is where the science becomes both fascinating and ecologically important.
Bats, mice, moths — natural eavesdroppers
Many small mammals and insects can detect frequencies in the 40-80 kHz range that plants emit. Moths are particularly good at this — they evolved their hearing to detect bats hunting them. The same hearing range overlaps perfectly with plant emissions.
This raises a striking possibility: insect pollinators or pests might be using plant ultrasonic signals to find healthy or stressed plants. A moth could potentially “hear” which tomato is suffering and avoid laying eggs there — or seek it out specifically.
Mother plant theory: trees warning their seedlings
Could plants themselves “hear” each other? It sounds far-fetched, but plants do respond to vibrations in measurable ways. The Hadany lab previously showed that plants increase nectar sugar when they detect pollinator wing beats. If plants can sense some vibrations, they might also sense the ultrasonic stress calls from neighbors.
| Organism | Hearing range | Could hear plants? |
|---|---|---|
| Humans | 20 Hz – 20 kHz | ❌ No |
| Dogs | 67 Hz – 45 kHz | ⚠️ Edge of range |
| Cats | 55 Hz – 79 kHz | ✓ Yes |
| Mice | 1 kHz – 91 kHz | ✓ Yes |
| Bats | 2 kHz – 200 kHz | ✓ Yes (clearly) |
| Most moths | 20 kHz – 100 kHz | ✓ Yes |
What this means ecologically
If even a fraction of insects and small mammals are listening, every garden, forest, and field is constantly broadcasting information that humans simply can’t perceive. A wheat field in drought isn’t silent — it’s a full ultrasonic chorus of distress signals, audible to the right ears.
5. Can plants feel pain? The hard scientific answer
Now we arrive at the question everyone really wants answered. We’ve established that plants emit sounds when stressed. But do plants scream in the way we mean — with experience, with suffering, with anything resembling consciousness?
Sound ≠ suffering
Here’s the uncomfortable truth: producing a sound and experiencing pain are entirely different things. A teakettle whistles. A car engine misfires. Neither feels anything. Plant ultrasonic emissions are mechanical — they’re cavitation events, the popping of bubbles in vascular tissue.
Why most biologists say “no”
The mainstream scientific position is that pain requires a nervous system — a structure that processes signals into experience. Plants have no neurons, no brain, and no neural pathways in any meaningful sense. They have signaling chemicals (auxins, jasmonic acid, etc.), but those govern growth and defense, not consciousness.
🧠 The neuroscience perspective: consciousness, in mainstream biology, requires a centralized information-integration system. Plants have distributed signaling networks, but no central “experiencer.” Without one, sound emission is just biology, not screaming.
But also why the question matters
That said, the discovery raises legitimate ethical and philosophical questions. If plants respond to threats, communicate via chemicals, alter their physiology under stress, and now emit sounds that other organisms can hear — at what point do we say they have something morally significant going on?
The honest answer is that science can describe what plants do, but cannot yet rule on what they “experience.” For now, the safest framing is: plants don’t scream the way humans do. But they’re not silent either. Like our piece on how the brain stores memory, the more we learn, the more boundaries blur.
Conclusion: Do plants scream — or just speak?
So, do plants scream? In the literal sense — they emit airborne ultrasonic clicks when stressed, and these sounds carry information about their condition. Whether that counts as “screaming” depends on what you mean by the word. There’s no nervous system, no felt experience, no suffering in the human sense.
But there’s something. Stressed plants are not silent — they’re broadcasting, even if they don’t know it. And other organisms — insects, mammals, possibly other plants — are quite likely listening. The next time you walk through a wheat field on a hot day, consider that you’re surrounded by an invisible, ultrasonic chorus you simply lack the ears to hear.
Plants don’t scream the way we do. But they’re not as silent as we thought. 🌱