The news that a flowering weed--mousear cress (Arabidopsis thaliana)--can sense the particular chewing noise of its most common caterpillar predator and adjust its chemical defenses in response led to headlines announcing the discovery of the first -hearing- plant. As plants lack central nervous systems (and, indeed, ears), the mechanisms behind this -hearing- are unquestionably very different from those of our own acoustic sense, but the misleading headlines point to an overlooked truth: plants do in fact perceive environmental cues and respond rapidly to them by changing their...