Your tomato plant may be crying out for you to water it, but although other animals and plants might hear it, your human ears are deaf to the sound of its laments. That’s the finding of new research that captured the pops and clicks of stressed plants, which have been tuned down to the human hearing range. 

Now, researchers led by Itzhak Khait, a plant scientist at Tel Aviv University, have recorded tobacco and tomato plants making high-frequency noises that could be detectable at distances of five meters, or 16 feet. The sound of the stressed plants was so specific that a machine learning tool was able to tell whether a plant was thirsty, suffering from cuts, or part of a control group based only on the pattern of its acoustic vibrations. 

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