You have to be careful who you mess with in life. Someone might seem easy to take advantage of, but you never know who they’re connected to or what kind of muscle they’ve got backing them up to fight their battles for them. That’s essentially what common bean plants are doing when caterpillars start chewing through their leaves. According to new research detailed in Science Advances, the plants release a chemical distress signal that summons predatory wasps to come handle the problem.
Researchers studying bean fields in Oaxaca, Mexico, recently discovered how all of this works. It revolves around something called the inceptin receptor, or INR, a protein on the surface of the bean plant cell. When caterpillars chew on bean plant leaves, chemicals from the insect’s saliva hit the damaged plant tissue. The INR receptor recognizes a specific peptide in the saliva, confirming that this isn’t some random damage from weather or someone with some gardening shears. This is a chew-based attack, and it must retaliate.
Bean Plants Have a Surprisingly Metal Defense Against Caterpillars
But it can’t. It’s just a bean plant. But it can do something pretty clever: it can start pumping out an airborne set of chemicals that call in wasps, making them think (correctly in this case) that there is free food here; come and get it. The wasps follow the scent straight to the caterpillars start ripping that thing apart. They’re not doing it to protect their body, the bean plant. They could probably care less about the being plant. But the bean plant took advantage of their hunger.
To test the theory, researchers compared normal bean plants with genetically altered plants missing the INR receptor. They found that plants without the receptor attracted about 40 percent fewer wasps, and caterpillars feeding on those plants grew nearly 73 percent larger because nothing was stopping them from eating in peace.
The researchers found this to be the case both in a laboratory setting and in real farmland, over multiple growing seasons. It’s not just a cool little factoid; it’s knowledge that scientists may be able to harness to help farmers one day reduce pesticide use by strengthening plants’ own biological defense systems, rather than spraying crops with potentially dangerous pesticides.
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