Sunflowers track the sun from east through west. Researchers thought they were just following the light of the sun, but experiments show that sunflowers still bend east to west when under a constant light source. From Scientific American:
It is one of the great symbols of summer: a sunflower (Helianthus annuus) bending to track the path of the Sun from east to west, straining to make the most of each day. At night, the sunflower eases back towards the east in preparation for daybreak.
Yet these flowers are not responding simply to light, but also to an internal clock, researchers have found.
Plant biologists Hagop Atamian and Stacey Harmer of the University of California in Davis grew sunflowers in a field and then transferred them to growth chambers with a fixed overhead light that was always on. The plants continued their daily journey from east to west and back for several days after the transfer, suggesting that they were not responding only to the direction of the light, but their own timekeeper.
“It brings into question whether there’s some sort of memory that’s found within the plant that allows this regulation,” says Mark Belmonte, a plant biologist at the University of Mannitoba in Winnipeg, Canada, who was not involved with the study. ”This could be a very fine-tuned process.”
Make sure you see them in action in the video.