Tomato plants can make clicking sounds when they are stressed. The clicks are ultrasonic—too high-pitched for ordinary human hearing—but microphones can detect them in the air around the plants.
Before declaring that your salad is yelling at you, there are a few scientific details worth keeping straight.
Researchers listened to dry and damaged plants
Scientists recorded tomato and tobacco plants under controlled conditions. Some were deprived of water; others had their stems cut. The team compared the sounds with those from plants that were not exposed to the same stress.
A 2023 study in Cell reported that stressed plants produced more airborne ultrasonic sounds, and the sounds differed in ways that allowed computer models to classify the plant’s condition.
The researchers also collected data in a greenhouse, moving the observation beyond the most tightly controlled acoustic chamber.
They aren’t speaking a secret language
The clicks are real physical emissions. That does not demonstrate that plants are consciously calling for help or intentionally communicating pain.
One possible explanation involves cavitation, when small gas bubbles form or collapse inside water-conducting tissues. Researchers are still investigating the precise sound-producing mechanism. But there is now experimental evidence that another organism can react to recordings of these clicks.
In a laboratory test, moths actually listened
In a 2026 study in eLife, researchers tested female Egyptian cotton leafworm moths with playback of ultrasonic clicks from dehydrated tomato plants. With no live plants in the test arena, females laid more egg clusters near the sound. When given two healthy tomato plants and playback beside only one of them, they instead favored the silent plant. Depriving the moths of hearing removed the sound-based preference.
That is evidence that these moths can use plant acoustic signals when deciding where to lay eggs. It does not show plants deliberately send messages, or that every insect in a field listens to tomato plants. The tests used controlled playback, not a survey of wild crops.
The January 2026 version of record documents an important limit: several playback tests used 60 clicks per minute, faster than a single young tomato plant normally produces. In a greenhouse test of 45 tomato seedlings deprived of water, the researchers measured a maximum of 20 clicks per minute with a microphone roughly 20 centimeters above the tray. A separate, longer-arena experiment using 30 clicks per minute still found a sound-related egg-laying preference. The authors argued that a larger patch of stressed plants could produce a higher aggregate click rate, but they did not establish moth behavior across an actual farm.
The Natural History Museum’s explanation makes the useful distinction between detectable noises and an animal-like cry.
Too high for our ears, but useful to measure
Human hearing has a limited frequency range. Ultrasound lies above that range, which is why a room full of stressed plants does not sound like a popcorn machine to us.
Specialized recording equipment can reveal a part of a plant’s physical response that normally passes unnoticed.
Could this help agriculture?
If different stress conditions produce reliably different acoustic signatures, growers might someday detect water problems earlier without inspecting every leaf. The 2023 experiments support the possibility, not a guarantee that a commercial sensor can diagnose every crop and disease.
BiggleBit has also looked at Venus flytraps counting electrical signals. Plants keep doing interesting things without behaving like animals.
The tomato doesn’t need a voice to give scientists something worth listening to.