I Am Groot: Is A Walking, Talking Plant-Person Possible? (Video)

(N.Morgan) Could you imagine a creature that was half plant, half well, animal hybrid? A Groot is a creature in the film Guardians Of The Galaxy and has the science world on its ear, theorizing if such a thing is possible.With all of the GMO research and such, I wonder if this will be their next project, in the splicing of DNA sequences of plants and human? The creatures they could possibly come up with are a bit horrifying. Lumbering around on his barky limbs, sprouting flowers and even dancing in a pot, one of the stars of the film “Guardians of the Galaxy” bizarrely blends the plant and animal kingdoms. Groot (also known as the Monarch of Planet X) is a fictional character, a superhero that appears in comic books published by Marvel Comics.

The character was reconfigured into a heroic, noble being in 2006, and appeared in the crossover comic book storyline “Annihilation: Conquest”. He went on to star in its spin-off series, Guardians of the Galaxy, joining the team of the same name. Groot has been featured in a variety of associated Marvel merchandise, including a feature in the Ultimate Spider-Man series and played a very brief role in the Uncanny X-Men series, animated television series, toys, and trading cards. Vin Diesel portrays Groot in the 2014 film Guardians of the Galaxy via voice acting and performance capture.

Plants that can smell and animals that regenerate show that animal and vegetable kingdoms may not be as far apart as they first appear. Some scientists even say Earth’s biology suggests the possibility of “thinking plants” somewhere in the universe.

In the film, Groot clearly hears, sees, feels — and talks (albeit, only three words, “I am Groot”). While one would be hard-pressed to find a talking vegetable on Earth, the idea of communicating and sensing plants is not at all outlandish, Danny Chamovitz, director of the Manna Center for Plant Biosciences at Tel Aviv University and author of “What a Plant Knows” (Scientific American, 2012), told Live Science. In fact, plants have a much richer, more dynamic life than most people give the leafy beings credit for, Chamovitz said. “We think of plants as un-living, because they’re unmoving,” Chamovitz said. “The strong scientific evidence is that plants have every sense familiar in animals, except hearing.”

They respond to chemicals, with lock-and-key mechanisms that resemble how animals smell. Plants have specific photoreceptors, which are proteins that respond to different wavelengths of light. They “know” when they’re being touched, Simon Gilroy, a professor of botany at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, told Live Science. Plants also have proprioception, or a sense of their location in space, Chamovitz said, which is why they can tell when they’re planted upside-down. Some plants can even “hear,” able to distinguish the vibration patterns made by different chewing caterpillars, according to a study detailed this summer in the journal Oecologia, Gilroy said. (Decades-old claims that plants can “hear music,” however, have little to no scientific support, he added.) This plant sensing may not seem evident — after all, plants don’t scream in pain or comment on Van Gogh’s use of color. But senses serve the same function in plants as they do in animals: Plants take in information, which travels through the plant body and causes some sort of response, Chamovitz said. [In Photos: Animals That Mimic Plants]

The familiar phenomenon of houseplants growing toward the window, for example, shows how plants sense and respond to light. When part of a plant gets eaten, that causes distress chemicals to propagate through the plant, which responds with chemical changes to make itself less tasty to the predator, Gilroy said. Not only can plants send signals within their own “bodies,” but those signals can also influence other plants. In other words, they communicate, Chamovitz said. A disease or pest infestation in a neighboring plant sends out chemical signals that cause nearby plants to respond. “They can smell when neighbors are sick,” Chamovitz said. “It gives off a chemical, so the plant defends itself.” Researchers have also shown corn seedlings lean toward sounds with a 220-Hertz frequency, the same tune emitted by the plants’ roots, and chili seedlings grow quicker when they sense a fennel plant is growing nearby.

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