As a Plant Nerd, I Take Issue With This ‘I Am Groot’ Detail

The second season of “I am Groot” has dropped, giving viewers five more teensy glances into what baby Groot gets up to when the other Guardians of the Galaxy aren’t looking. In episode 2, “Groot Noses Around,” Groot goes looking for a battery when his video game controller runs out of juice. While rummaging through a bucket of electronics, he finds a bionic nose.

Groot slaps the schnoz on his face and finds that he can smell things now! How cool! He goes around smelling stuff until he comes back to the couch where he was playing video games. It’s filthy with rotten food and god knows what else, and the smell hits him. Whomp whomp.

First off, I wish I could deactivate my sense of smell sometimes. Secondly, does this mean that Groot canonically can’t smell anything? In all those Guardians of the Galaxy movies, was he just going around with no sense of smell the whole time? He couldn’t even smell that little flower that he grew from his own arm? Huh.

As a Marvel fan, I found it fun to ponder that revelation. As a botany nerd, though? I was in some thorny emotional territory.

Plants actually have great senses of smell

Did you know real trees communicate through chemical signals? It’s true! For example, when a giraffe starts to eat acacia leaves, that acacia tree will emit ethylene gas, which warns other nearby acacias that there’s a dreaded herbivore on the loose. Once the ethylene hits them, the other trees will release bitter tannins into their leaves, making them unpalatable to the giraffes.

Are these chemical signals the same as smelling? Trees may not have the same subjective experience of airborne chemicals that we do, but similar behavior has been observed in plants ranging from willow trees to lima beans. At Penn State, Dr. Consuelo De Moraes conducted an experiment with a parasitic plant called a dodder vine, which feeds on tomato plants. No matter how thoroughly she concealed the tomato plant, the dodder leaned in its direction, hoping to feed. After several iterations of the experiment, including a synthetic tomato smell on cotton swabs, De Moraes concluded that the dodder could functionally smell the tomato.

Therefore, Groot shouldn’t have needed a bionic nose to smell!

Ha HA! See what I did there? I used a clickbaity headline to trick you into learning science! I don’t actually care whether Groot has a sense of smell or not. He’s a made-up alien from a comic book movie. I just wanted to geek out about plants, and I conned you into being an accessory to it. Now you know a cool plant fact, and you can’t un-know it!

Now go outside and appreciate how cool plants are.

(featured image: Disney+)