this post was submitted on 21 Feb 2026
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Exactly! I’ve said this for years, every time the meme comes up. I’m saying it right now to anyone nearby.
I mean, I have no real basis to know if canopy friction is the reason or not but I’m saving this post as support of my confirmation bias anyway.
Apparently that's the leading theory, but another is just that for reasons I am absolutely unqualified to explain, they sense light in specific ways that causes them to grow differently once they get close enough to another tree blocking some of the light there.
Like a houseplant angling toward the window light?
A little, the stretching house plant demonstrates how plants can sense the direction light is coming from. They can also sense qualities of light. They can tell if light is filtered through other leaves, for instance. I would speculate that refected light also has a unique color (wavelength) distribution that a plant could sense and respond to
Terms like "sense" and "tell" are a bit misleading. It's very much a chemical/mechanical interaction that's automatic. Rather like soap bubbles "sensing" when they've reached the surface of the water.
Plants contain a protein called phototropin, which is activated by light. When it's activated, it changes the shape and alignment of the "skeleton" of the cell, making it more cube-shaped as opposed to long and skinny.
That means the light side of a plant gets shorter, while the dark side remains long. The dark side also grows slightly faster, on a count of having more cells there (you can fit more skinny cells side-by-side than wide cells), and so the plant angles and grows toward the light.
I mean, so are our sense before being processed by the brain.
What's a tree's brain in this analogy?
Nothing, but I'd argue you don't need a brain for the sensory parts doing sensing to count as senses.
I'd disagree with that argument and draw an analogy with the short reactive pathways triggered by e.g. that thing where you tap a knee with a hammer and it jerks; I don't think the reaction loop there counts as a sense, and only when you add in the CNS and perception of it does it even connect to one. But it's hardly a cut'n'dried argument and I'm sure there's a lot left to plausibly disagree on here
Tell me you don't communicate science often without saying it. Know the audience is rule 1.
But ok, 'tell' is useful anthropormophism to get an idea across. Sensing though? In what way is reacting to a stimuli not sensing? It is the word scientific papers use. What would you say instead?
The reflected light of other leaves wouldn’t cause photosynthesis since it only has wavelengths that the chloroplasts reflect. They wouldn’t have any light to absorb, or at least a lot less.
I imagine it’s like expecting regular soda and getting diet.
It seems as far as we can tell, trees can detect "far red" spectrum light, suspected to be done via phytochromes, and that spectrum of light is in higher quantities when closer to other tree leaves because it gets reflected off.
They detect that, and don't grow as much in that direction since it would cause diminishing returns.