No joke,
Scientist have been studying the communication plants have with each other
Scientists at Kyoto University in Japan let spider mites loose on lima-bean plants and tracked the plants' responses. They found five different defense mechanisms. First, each injured plant released a chemical that changed its flavor, making it less attractive to the mites. Then the plants released other chemicals that drifted away. Other lima bean plants received the chemical and immediately begin giving off the same chemicals, making themselves less tasty and warning still more lima bean plants, before the mites even reached them.
Most amazingly, some of the released chemicals had the effect of summoning a whole new batch of mites--mites that, rather than eating lima bean plants, preferred to eat the spider mites attacking the lima bean plants.
The Japanese researchers even found that the plants could distinguish between insect damage and crushing damage. They crushed some leaves and stems and found that although the injured plants released chemicals, the surrounding plants ignored them, somehow recognizing no real danger existed. (It appears that substances in the attacking insects' saliva are required to trigger the anti-insect chemical response in the plant.)
Other examples from agriculture are also known. Corn under attack from armyworms, for instance, puts out a chemical signal that attracts a predatory wasp. The wasp lays its eggs inside the armyworm; when they hatch, the wasp larva eat the armyworm.
And a study released last week shows that this kind of signaling exists not only in agricultural situations and in labs, but in the wild--which means it is likely widespread throughout the plant kingdom.
Researchers from the Max Planck Institute for Chemical Ecology in Jena, Germany, discovered that when a species of wild tobacco plant that grows in the southwestern United States is damaged by hornworms (the larva of the hawkmoth) it releases chemicals that attract predatory insects that kill the larva.
Oh yeah?? sez who?!!!
