Plants appear to “think”: green plants may regulate their uptake and loss of gases by distributed computation.

By studying the distributions of these patches of open and closed stomata in leaves of the cocklebur plant, Utah State University researchers found specific patterns reminiscent of distributed computing. Patches of open or closed stomata sometimes move around a leaf at constant speed, for example.

The statistics of the size of these patches and of the waiting times between the appearance of successive patches are the same as those for a model of cellular automata, the researchers say. The individual leaf stomata appear to act like simple computers, responding to what their neighboring stomata are doing.