Question

Are dead leaves living things?

Answer 1

Hint: All living organisms whether plants or animals show some certain characteristics. When we try to define the word ‘living’, we conventionally look for these distinct characteristics. Growth, reproduction, ability to sense and react to the environment comes to our mind immediately as we start thinking about living organisms. One can add a few more features like metabolism, ability to self-replicate, self-organize, interact and emergence to this list.

Complete answer:
 A picture of a dead leaf is given below:

You can see that this leaf has lost its natural green color, and crumbled and become yellowish-orange. This leaf will not show any growth when it is placed in water or any nutrient media. Some leaves can take part in reproduction (vegetative reproduction) as they bear buds on their leaf margins, for e.g., leaves of Bryophyllum. But the dead leaves will never be able to reproduce. Metabolism and every other intrinsic living property in these leaves stop and they get detached from the plant and fall.
So, the dead leaves are obviously not living.

Note:
One may talk about the fact that in a dead leaf, the tracheary elements (xylem and phloem) may still conduct very minute amounts of water over a short distance. One should remember here that the conduction elements of both xylem and phloem are dead. In xylems, only the xylem parenchyma comprises the living components, the tracheid, vessels, and xylem fibers are non-living. Similarly, in the phloem, the bast fibers or phloem fibers are dead but the dead elements help in conduction of the food.
Even if you place a roll of tissue paper in water, it will soak water due to cellulose present in it, but that does not mean that the tissue paper is living.