The Karma of Eating Triffids

The objective of any Buddhist is to do as little harm as possible. Not to kill sentient beings. Thus being vegetarian. But are plants non-sentient? A letter in the January 27th New Yorker reflects on mobility and intent with some tropical plants. Come back, John Wyndham, all is forgiven!

I applaud the attention that Pollan pays to botany in his article, but he failed to mention that not all plants live rooted in one place. Alternatives to this “sessile life style” are clear among tropical species and are much more analogous to animals than the examples he provides. Certain fig trees can “walk” on their stilt roots to extract themselves from an overly shady spot, or escape from under a tree that has fallen on them. (In an instance of comedy reflecting scientific discovery, Monty Python riffed on a strikingly similar idea when they made fun of David Attenborough in a 1974 sketch called “The Walking Tree of Dahomey.”) Even more spectacular are species I have termed “nomadic vines,” which wander a distance far in excess of their relatively unchanging length. One such nomad is the philodendron in your dentist’s waiting room. In a rain forest, some philodendrons remain a few yards in length and yet they meander through a tree’s canopy, acting like a snake searching for a place to bask. The plant grows small leaves and long thin stems to move quickly when in shade, changing over to the thick stems and large leaves when it reaches a patch of sunlight. Both walking trees and nomads change locations without muscles. Taking advantage of the “modular” strategy Pollan describes, they grow in the direction of motion while leaving their trailing parts to die. The results are fantastical: when a canopy-dwelling plant, such as an orchid, falls from a tree, it’s likely to perish in the understory shade. But the philodendron simply uncoils itself, crawls over to the nearest tree trunk, and climbs up again.

Mark W. Moffett
National Museum of Natural HistorySmithsonian Institution
Washington, D.C.

 I did not know that, but I glory in a botanist named Pollan!  (pollen get it?)

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