[ENGLISH] TIL that plants don't sleep

atiliog (61)in #til • 8 years ago

Greetings Steemit community, well as the title says, today I learned that plants do not sleep. But how did this question came to my mind? It turns out that I was having a nice talk with a friend, we talked about various topics and different things, and there comes a certain moment that we started talking about dreams and sleeping, and why this activity is so important for living beings, in that moment my mind is "enlightened" by saying "Do plants sleep?" For being living organisms, almost anyone would say or think so, but this is not so.

Source

As we know sleeping is an essential activity for both humans and animals, there is a peculiarity that occurs with plants, they do not need to, this is because plants do not have a CNS (Central Nervous System), but they do have a circadian rhythm that works at all times, for example when the sun is hidden the process of photosynthesis is “turned off”, using all its concentration in transporting glucose throughout the plant, and some close their flowers when the sun is hidden.

Plants undergo different changes in their physiology, which depend on the time of day, for example at 10 am could behave in some way because of these changes, while at 10 pm in a very different way, for example in the morning the plants take advantage of the solar rays to realize the photosynthesis, whereas at night happen other processes like the production of the hormone auxin that is related to the growth and different metabolic processes.

In conclusion, plants do not sleep, while in the day they absorb energy through photosynthesis, at the night they focus on the transformation and transport of energy and their physiological processes undergo a change between day and night.

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