Chemical Screams and Faulty Intelligence


When plants are bitten, they emit a “chemical scream”, writes Ed Yong. That means they emit chemicals in the air that do one or more of the following:
  1. Confuse or repel the pests;
  2. Attract wasps or other insects that would attack the predator!
  3. Signal other parts of the same plant to ramp up defenses.

Sometimes, these signals can spread across entire fields warning other plants in the vicinity. Neat, right?

But wait, it gets even more fascinating. The silverleaf whitefly can “hack this communication system”! Somehow, in ways not yet understood:
  1. They change the warning signal of the plant to convey the wrong type of threat (microbial v insect).
  2. Even better (or worse, depending on whether you are pest or plant), this “faulty intelligence” can then make the plant “more susceptible to the whiteflies”.
  3. And since, as mentioned at the top, the signal percolates to the entire field of plants, the entire field is now ripe for the picking. The field in this misinformed state allows whitefly to grow “faster than they would have on plants that had received no warnings at all”.

All this would explain why the silverleaf whitefly is so devastating in its invasions.

So what’s next in this war? Who can say, but humans as farmers are on the side of the plants. Ergo, humans are building machines that “eavesdrop on the chemical alarms of plants, warning farmers of infestations in real time”.

And then there are particular wasps that feed on these whiteflies. They home in on the chemicals released by the infected plants to attack the whiteflies:
“The whiteflies can fool their hosts, and the neighbors of their hosts, but they can’t fool the wasp.”

And so round and round we go in these evolutionary battles.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Student of the Year

Image
As a toddler, my daughter loved Alia Bhatt’s songs, esp. the ones from Student of the Year . (That movie did have many good songs and well-choreographed dances). Fast forward to present day, when she is 12 yo. She rarely watches Hindi movies now, but one of the few ones she likes of late, Raja aur Rani ki Prem Kahani has, yes, Alia Bhatt.   If I had any hopes that there was anything to be read in the name of her toddler-time favorite ( Student of the Year ), they have been dashed. Our conversations come exam time are perfectly captured by this photo and its caption: In fact, the pic below captures how she and I look at her answer sheets – me intently, she with an expression of “It’s over, so why are you even looking at it?”   Of late, we pull her leg and tell her that she isn’t showing any signs of academic prowess, she’d better find a rich guy to marry. Some time later, she showed us this meme on the Internet: “Me No Study, Me No Care Me Go Marry Millionaire If He Die
Read more

The Retort of the "Luxury Person"

Image
Coming up with biting and witty retorts. It’s something we dream of, but rarely manage to pull off. Worse, the more we stew over the offending remark, the more likely we are to come up with that dream retort, as Calvin ruefully points out: During our last holiday at the Taj Resort, seeing my wife carrying towels to our poolside chairs, one of the kids there mistook her for a member of the staff and asked for a towel. When my wife narrated this to us, I did not imagine that my 8 yo daughter would come up with her own retort. But a day later, my daughter recapped the incident, an incident that didn’t even involve her in the first place , and said, “You know what I’d have told that kid who asked for the towel?”. And without waiting for an answer, she told us anyway: “I don’t work here. I too am a luxury person who is living at this resort. Go get your own towel.” We were highly amused by the phrase she had coined: “luxury person”. It certainly captures the kind of holid
Read more

Animal Senses #7: Touch and Remote Touch

Instinctively, we think touch is based on contact. Not entirely true, explains Ed Yong in Immense World – there’s a more important aspect than contact: “These incredible feats are possible through movement. If you rest a fingertip upon a surface, you can get only a limited idea of its features. But as soon you’re allowed to move, everything changes. Hardness becomes apparent with a press. Textures resolve at a stroke.” As you run your fingers over a surface, they hit the tiny peaks and troughs and set off vibrations in the mechanoreceptors at their tips.   At the tip of its snout, the star-nosed mole has many pairs of hairless appendages. It uses them to touch things around itself. Alive or dead? Food or ignore? It does these movements at an insane speed. In the time it takes to blink our eyes, the star-nosed mole can probe, identify and swallow its food. “Light may be the fastest thing in the universe, but light sensors have their limits, and the star-nosed mole’s sense of
Read more