Shameplant

When I was a child we had a shameplant (mimosa pudica) which my mum loved and which me and my sisters loved to touch to get the reaction of the leaves. To make a short story shorter the plant died, and we used to say that we scared it to death, and somehow I think we believed it was so. Today I'm staying at home, recovering from sinusitis (that is what talking about refreshing common cold gets you) so photographing our shameplant (which I bought to give my children the experience I had as a child) is somewhat an emergency blip, but also an opportunity to learn something more about a plant, which death I had on my consciousness throughout my youth (sic)! The key word for my reading is tigmonasty, the reaction of a plant to movement or touching. In the case of the shameplant, this movement can be caused by darkness, wind, rain, touching of an insect (i.e some kind of protective mechanism)..or touching by curious children, fascinated by the immediate retractive reaction of the leaves. From a recent article in Plants I found that the plant has got a motor organ called pulvinus at the junction of the leaflet-rachilla, rachilla-petiole, and petiole-stem, and upon mechanical stimulation, this organ (using water flux and long distance signalling) immediately closes the leaflets and moves the petiole. The turning back to normal can take up to half an hour for the shameplant (and up to days for carnivorous plants that use the same mechanism). What is there not to love about this plant?
My teenagers have promised not to scare the plant to death.