Experiment to see how much a young coral tree will adapt to shortened days. The plant was placed in a darkroom and an artificial light was used to simulate daylight. Doing this, the normal 24-hour cycle could be reduced to less than 10 hours. After that the plant seemed to get confused and different leaves were responding differently to each other. At that stage I felt sorry for the plant and returned it to natural light. The plant recovered its rhythm in less than a normal day.
Detailed description:
After 5 months of growth, indoors in natural daylight, folding the leaves down every evening, I needed to know what influence time, rather than light, had on the nastic movement. While in mid evening. 22:30, I took the smaller of the two saplings and placed it in a darkroom in total darkness. This video shows the coral tree sapling, illuminated only by infra-red light,start raising its leaves at about 01:20 - just as it normally would do.
By the time daylight would normally arrive, 07:10, the leaves were positioned as they normally would have been, but that is were the upward movement stopped. The leaves remained in this half-raised position until, after 24 hours, I succumbed to a strong sense of being cruel and turned on an artificial light.
After more than 24 hours in darkness, and 14 hours after they would normally have raised to greet the daylight, the leaves remained in the half-raised position. Now at 22:30 I turn on an artificial light. Notice how the leaves rise and then start lowering after about 6 hours of light. I leave the light on for a futher4 hours but the leaves remained in the half-lowered position.
At 08:30 I turned off the lights. Immediately the leaves resumed the downward movement, bottoming out 5 hours later at 13:13. The leaves then changed direction, rising to a highest level at 19:49. For the next half-hour no significant movement occurred.
I turned the lights on and noticed that the higher leaves rose while the lower leaves moved downward, changing to upward movement after the upper leaves had already past their peak and started moving down again. After 2 hours of light the movement was predominantly downward again, so that is when I turned off the lights.
With the lights out, the leaf movement predictably became downward - but most leaves did not descend all the way and descent was virtually complete after just two hours, at 00:30. Of course, I guessed that they now wanted more light - so I turned the lights on again.
This time they rose only about 20 degrees and stayed there. 4 and a half hours later the leaves had still shown no sign of moving in any direction, so I turned the lights off.
In just 1 hour the leaves moved down to the usual low point and for another half hour they all started rising again, so after less than an hour and a half of darkness I turned the lights on again.
The next light cycle lasted just over 3 hours. And the next dark cycle lasted 4 hours. Followed by a 4 hour leaf-rising light cycle. It lookes like it is settling into a 21-day week with 4-hour light followed by 4-hour dark cycles.
But then the coral tree sapling got a mind of it's own - or maybe it went insane - because it stopped responding to the dark. Watch as the leaves all make small random movements instead of moving downward. At 22:30 - the time that the experiment started, I moved the plant back to the position next to a window where its slightly larger sibling is growing.
Now back in its natural environment, notice how the leaves remain in the mid position until dawn, when they immediately resume the old, natural pattern as can be seen by the plant in the background.
Thank you for watching.
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Plant real-time growth response to lightby CLABxx2,064 views
haha
it's like:
darkness: *sad* oooh.. <=(
light: OOOOH! <=D
scepticly 10 months ago