The new critique debunks claims that trees can sense eclipses

“He’s putting forward some very reasonable ideas,” Cahill said of Novoplansky’s criticism. “The original work should have been tested among a number of different theories rather than focusing on a single explanation. This is partly what makes it pseudoscience and promotes a worldview.”

Admittedly, “[p]Lants have the most extensive and well-established means of communication, and those that are flexible are the most well-studied and understood.” “There is also growing recognition that root exudates play a role in plant-plant interactions, although this is currently under intensive investigation. Nothing else, the mychorriza connection, has stood up to independent investigation.”

Chiolerio and Gagliano stand by their research, saying they have always accepted the preliminary nature of their results. “We measured it [weather-related elements like] temperature, relative humidity, rainfall and daily solar radiation,” Chiolerio told Ars. We did not measure natural electric fields, however; therefore, I cannot rule out effects caused by nearby lightning. We did not have gravitational probes, we did not test neutrinos, cosmic rays, magnets, etc.

“I won’t talk about criticism that hasn’t been published in the media, but I can clarify our position,” Gagliano told Ars. “Ours [2025] the paper reports the pattern of electrophysiological formation/synchrony in the eclipse window, including changes that begin before the eclipse, and we discuss the candidate indicators clearly as hypotheses rather than demonstrated causes. Describing weather/lightning as ‘very bad’ is not evidence of causation. Regional lightning strike statistics and other proxies may encourage a competing hypothesis, but they do not establish a causal explanation for the recording field without time-resolved, time-aligned field measurements. Without those measurements, the lightning/climate account remains a hypothesis among other possibilities rather than an established or automatic interpretation of the signals we recorded.”