Can plants have fevers?

Question

my friend told me that a plant can run a fever

is this true?

Answer 1

They have done experiments in Japan that showed plants can feel pain and have fevers.

Answer 2

Plants do not have fevers and they do not feel pain.  Likewise, they don't listen to music and they don't grow faster when Granny talks to them.

There is a bunch of misinformation about plants out there that seems to have come from some lazy people who do not want to actually look at the scientific evidence.

Answer 3

No.  Plants pretty much come to the same temperature as the surrounding air.  Fevers in animals are a function of the immune response to disease and infection.  Plants do not have a comparable system.

Answer 4

Not in the same sense that animals would have a fever - for us, a fever is the body's defense to try and kill a pathogen by raising the temperature to a point where the proteins aren't able to function correctly.

But members of the plant familiy Araceae are able to increase the internal temperature of their flowers.  Last I heard, there was no definitive reason for why they do this, but some hypotheses include to keep pollen dry (plants are generally tropical or subtropical in areas of high humidity, but also includes skunk cabbage, which can bloom when there's snow on the ground), to provide warmth for pollinators (this makes sense for the skunk cabbage, but not so much for tropical memebrs of the group), and to increase the odor the flowers produce to attract pollinators (the scent might be more intense or travel farther outside the flower in the warmth and temperature differential).  At any rate, it works for these plants.

A couple of websites where you can read more about this - many are PDF files, so I can't link these directly, but you can access them from the results of this web search:  http://search.yahoo.com/search?p=Araceae...