Wesley R. Elsberry
Posts: 4991
Joined: May 2002
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Other than than both show an increase and subsequent decrease in voltage, there isn't much similarity.
Gary doesn't use axis information, so he apparently missed the approximately 100,000x difference in time course between the two phenomena, and the approximately 4x difference in amplitude.
There's this text in the article:
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Electrical interaction between bee and flower was further explored by placing Petunia integrifolia flowers in an arena with free-flying foraging bees. The electric potential in Petunia stems was recorded to assess the electrical signature produced by the approach and landing of an individual charged bee. Charge transfer to the flower resulted in a positive change in electric potential recorded in the stem. The landing of 50 individuals resulted in a mean potential change lasting ~100 s, which peaked at ~25 ± 3 mV (SD = 24, n = 50) (Fig. 1B). Such change exceeds natural fluctuations in the absence of bees (Fig. 1B) and outlasts the presence of the bee on the flower. This change in potential is often initiated before contact with the bee (movie S1), suggesting that this is not simply a hydraulic wound-response variation potential as in (16) but involves direct electrostatic induction between the charged bee and the grounded flower as hypothesized in (7, 8).
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This does not appear to support the notion of an active electrical response in flower physiology, but rather a passive transfer of charge from bee to flower. And, again, the change in voltage is far different in time-scale and amplitude from a neural action potential.
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"You can't teach an old dogma new tricks." - Dorothy Parker
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