Can Plants Actually Get Sunburned?

By: Danny Berger

So it feels like forever since anything new has been posted on our blog (which it essentially has, 329 days to be exact), so we’re going to make more of an effort to post more consistently about things we find interesting, as well as about local southwest Florida topics.

Anyhow, last Monday’s solar eclipse here in southwest Florida was a little underwhelming to me. If I hadn’t known that there was going to be a solar eclipse, I wouldn’t have noticed any difference outside during the actual eclipse. To me, the sky in southwest Florida during the eclipse looked a little bit hazy for a minute or so. I guess I was expecting the sky to be a little darker and for the temperature to drop a few degrees, like on a cloudy day here. Even though I thought that the solar eclipse was going to bring more of a noticeable change to the sky here in southwest Florida, it was nevertheless cool to see it through the special solar eclipse glasses. But with all the talk about the solar eclipse being able to damage your eyes if you looked at the sun without the proper eye protection, it got me to think about if plants can actually get damaged by the sun, or ever sunburned. I had heard somewhere that citrus trees and other tropical fruit trees can get sunburned, and a few days after the solar eclipse, a video by SciShow coincidentally popped up on my YouTube newsfeed about plants and sunburn. According to SciShow, plants can actually get sunburned (just like I had thought all along), see how in their video below: