One of the (too many) projects I’ve been working on for a bit is automating a hydroponic growing system with a focus on individual level use but easy replication for lots of individuals. So a grow system for every home, but easy to make and deploy in a lot of homes.
One of the cool things about growing things is it gives you this really intimate sense of life developing and changing on a time scale that’s long enough that it isn’t “instant”, but not so long that the results of any particular set of developmental or stimuli events aren’t obvious really quickly. You get a sense of how much information a seed has about what it needs to do right away, and how the seed itself is designed to support all of those initial instructions. You get to see the seed transition from having pretty much everything it needs to initiate development independent of it’s environment into a thing completely dependent on it’s environment. Growing things, whether human animals or icky zucchini is a wonderfully rich information stream if you let it be.
But that’s not this post, this post is about the interaction of environment on organisms. A tomato is always going to be a tomato. However the properties of that tomato that we actually care about are almost entirely derived from it’s interactions with the environment.
In one of the grow units, the leaves on the tomatoes were looking amazing. Roots? Perfect. The next day I notice that the leaves were a lot more vertical, but still looked great. The next day, the leaves were pointing almost straight vertical. Usually this happens when plants are “reaching” out toward a light source because they aren’t getting enough light, but that’s impossible because it’s all automated right?
The problem of course was that the automatic notifications I cleverly engineered into the system weren’t working because one of the girls knocked the power adapter controlling the notification receiver out of the power strip. Because I was only focused on reporting errors at the time, I programmed it to only push errors, and I designed my software to only report those errors to a dashboard, not to perform status checks on the sensors themselves (for individual units in houses, this would be unnecessary).
Hoisted by my own clever petard, it did provide the opportunity to see the differential effect of stress on the plants across various stages of development. And you get to see how really quickly how the more mature plants, with more development are able to snap back from those stresses pretty quickly, and how younger plants carry that for their entire developmental period.
For example the leaves on the older plants went back to normal pretty quickly, while the younger plants never quite got there. You can taste the difference in the fruit, despite having seemingly the same environment.
There was a pretty significant difference in the amount of flowering, and even changes to the amount of pollen each plant produced. Some plants in the later stages actually improved yield from the stress. Some plants barely flowered at all and I had to reset them (heh, this sounds so much more grim than I’d like to think it was).
Anyway, it was an interesting bit of perspective whenever we talk about the interaction of genes and environment – yes genes drive development, but the environment drives growth.