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Entomology
Tiny Wasps Enlist Plants to Woo Mates
Wasp alters mix of chemicals the plant produces.
Many insects waft sex pheromones through the air to lure a mate. But LAS researchers recently discovered the first insects that trick plants to do their wooing for them. A tiny parasitic wasp that lives inside common prairie plants attracts mates by inducing the plants to alter the mix of chemicals it produces.
The flea-sized gall wasp that lives most of the year as larvae
inside the stems of compass plants before metamorphosing into
adult wasps, which escape each spring to see the world, mate,
and die. As he walked in a prairie one day, former entomology
graduate student John Tooker spotted adult male gall wasps staking
out territory along the stem of compass plants. Each would charge
and head-butt other males that invaded his turf. Tooker kept watching,
and eventually an adult female would chew her way out of the stem
exactly where the male was guarding.
"
Tooker wondered how they knew where the female would emerge," says
entomology professor Lawrence Hanks, Tooker's advisor.
It turned out that the male wasps smell their way to a mate.
Female wasps inside the stem manipulate nearby plant cells to
alter the
mix of chemicals called pinenes that they produce. Male wasps
then smell the altered pinene mix from outside the stem.
The results could lead to a new method of biological pest control,
Hanks says. If other plant-eating insects change the mix of plant
chemicals, predatory insect-eating creatures like beetles that
eat them might smell it, too. If so, then spraying the right
chemicals might attract the beetles to munch away on plant-eating
bugs,
which would protect crops.
October 2003