Why is it if you dont water or water w/ salt water the plant wilts??

Question

If you dont water a plant it wilts, if you water it with salt water it wilts. Why is this????

Answer 1

Plant cells have rigid cell walls, but they have to be filled with water in order for them to hold their shape. If they are deprived of water, the cells collapse due to the lack of internal pressure and the plant goes limp.

Salt draws moisture out of the cells, causing a similar effect. The effect is called osmosis. What happens is fairly simple: The water outside the cells is salty, and the water inside them is not. To reach equilibrium (such that the water inside and outside the cells have the same salt concentration), one of two things must happen: water moves out, or salt comes in. Salt cannot pass through a cell wall (or not very well, at least), but water can; as a result, the water migrates out of the cell in an attempt to re-balance the salt concentrations. As above, the cells are deprived of water, they collapse, and the plant goes limp.

Answer 2

Because plant cells are made of primarily water. Plants continually transpire water (release water from their leaves), so if they don't replace it, they lose turgidity and wilt. If you water with salt water the same thing happens, as all of the water in the plant cells moves out to the area of high solute concentration.

Answer 3

Water is like blood for plants, without it there is nothing to transport their nutrients. Plant use a process called transpiration. Basically they evaporate water at their leaves, and in the process this causes them to uptake water and nutrients. This process produces a gradient of solutes from high concentration (in the ground) to low concentration (at the stomata, where transpiration occurs.) This uptake of water happens in a single direction, from roots to shoots.

The problem with salt water is that it causes the water to move the opposite direction. Because water containing salt, will naturally attract water containing less salt, through the process of OSMOSIS. This means all the water in the plants cells will become dehydrated because they contain water which has less ions it it than the salt water given to the plant. Basically the salt water pulls the exising water in the plant out, sort of like dehydrating it. For humans, we just consume more water when we are dehydrated, but since plant rely on this gradient of water, they can't transpire enough water to fully dilute out the salt water and thus they die.