Zen and the Art of Temperature Maintenance

Scientists at the Iwate University in Japan have shown that the skunk cabbage -- a species of arum lily and whose Japanese name, Zazen-sou, means Zen meditation plant -- can maintain its own internal temperature at about 20 degrees Celsius, even on a freezing day (see Physics News Graphics).

The plant occurs in East Asia and northeastern North America, where its English name comes from its bad smell and from the fact that its leaves are like those of cabbage. Unlike the case of mammals, which maintain their body temperature by constant metabolism in cells all over the body, heat in the skunk cabbage is produced chiefly in the spadix, the plant’s central spike-like flowering stalk through chemical reactions in the cells’ mitochondria.

According to one of the authors of the new study, Takanori Ito (taka1@iwate-u.ac.jp), only one other plant species, the Asian sacred lotus, is homeothermic, that is, able to maintain its own body temperature at a certain level. Most other plants do not produce heat in this way because they seem to lack the thermogenic genes (the technical name for which, in abbreviated form, is SfUCPb). Moreover, the researchers, studying subtle oscillations in the plant’s internal temperature, claim that the thermo-regulation process is chaotic and that this represents the first evidence for deterministic chaos among the higher plants.

The resultant trajectory in the abstract phase space (where, typically, one plots the plant’s temperature at one time versus the temperature at another time) is a strange attractor, which the authors refer to as a Zazen attractor, a "Zen meditation" attractor.

Ito and Ito, Physical Review E, November 2005