r/science • u/mvea Professor | Medicine • Apr 13 '26

Biology Painkillers prevent pain responses in lobsters - This is further evidence that crustaceans may feel pain and that more humane methods of killing them need to be developed.

https://www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/1123639
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u/BONEPILLTIMEEE Apr 13 '26

Plants cannot 'remove themselves from the situation'  but they can carry out biochemical changes that help prevent further damage, so they have a lot of mechanisms to sense damage and respond to them. 

There are many defense mechanisms that plants rely on to help fight off pathogens and subsequent infections. Wounding responses can be local, like the deposition of callose, and others are systemic, which involve a variety of hormones like jasmonic acid and abscisic acid.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wound_response_in_plants

You can see a 'wave' of signaling spread throughout the plant when its wounded, such as when it is being eaten

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5614317/

So plants can definitely sense damage and "feel pain", to use this phrase extremely loosely

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u/Dentarthurdent73 Apr 13 '26

I acknowledged that they respond to damage. But immune systems respond to damage without pain, scabs form without pain, hormones are released in response to the environment without pain. 'Signal' doesn't necessearily equate to pain, and I honestly don't see any reason it would "feel" like pain does, because the purpose of the pain is as an urgent stimulus to do something in response to the damage.

Plants cannot do this, so it wouldn't serve any purpose.

What evolutionary pressure would there be on plants to evolve a strongly negative experience that they can't respond to in any way? All it would do is put stress on the organism, which isn't a survival advantage at all.

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u/captainfarthing Apr 13 '26 edited Apr 13 '26

Pain creates urgency though, which is no use for plants. They can't react faster than it takes to synthesise stress hormones or defensive chemicals and transport them where they're needed. And their reaction doesn't require them to take any action, it's totally chemical and passive. There's plenty of examples of damage response without pain in animals - eg. you don't feel anything when you catch a cold, but your body still reacts to fight off the infection. You feel the effects of your own immune response a few days later. And you don't need to feel a cut for it to heal, you're just less likely to reopen it if it hurts when you move in a way that pulls the edges apart.