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Circumnutations are widespread in plants and typically associated withexploratory movements, however a quantitative understanding of their roleremains elusive. In this study we report, for the first time, the role of noisycircumnutations in facilitating an optimal growth pattern within a crowdedgroup of mutually shading plants. We revisit the problem of self-organizationobserved for sunflowers, mediated by shade response interactions. Our analysisreveals that circumnutation movements conform to a bounded random walkcharacterized by a remarkably broad distribution of velocities, covering threeorders of magnitude. In motile animal systems such wide distributions ofmovement velocities are frequently identified with enhancement of behavioralprocesses, suggesting that circumnutations may serve as a source of functionalnoise. To test our hypothesis, we developed a parsimonious model of interactinggrowing disks, informed by experiments, successfully capturing thecharacteristic dynamics of individual and multiple interacting plants.Employing our simulation framework we examine the role of circumnutations inthe system, and find that the observed breadth of the velocity distributionconfers advantageous effects by facilitating exploration of potentialconfigurations, leading to an optimized arrangement with minimal shading. Thesefindings represent the first report of functional noise in plant movements, andestablishes a theoretical foundation for investigating how plants navigatetheir environment by employing computational processes such as task-orientedprocesses, optimization, and active sensing.

Noisy circumnutations facilitate self-organized shade avoidance in sunflowers