Laboratory of Evolutionary Ecology

In her new publication, Priscila shows how plants respond to different insect herbivores

6/2/2023

Plants produce diverse chemical defences with contrasting effects on different insect herbivores. Deploying herbivore-specific responses can help plants increase their defensive efficacy. Here, we exposed 149 plants of Salix fragilis to 22 herbivore species from various orders and feeding guilds and explored the induced responses in volatiles and non-volatile leaf metabolites.
The volatile composition was best explained by chewing damage and insect order. Furthermore, we recorded significant differences in elicited volatiles among some species within the orders. Variation in non-volatile leaf metabolites was mainly explained by the presence of insects, as plants exposed to herbivores showed significantly different metabolites from controls.

Overall, we thus show that the induction of volatile and non-volatile leaf metabolites showed different levels of specificity. The specificity in volatiles could potentially serve as an important cue to specialized predators or parasitoids, increasing the efficacy of volatiles as indirect defences. In contrast, the induction of non-volatile leaf metabolites was largely unaffected by herbivore identity. Most non-volatile metabolites were downregulated, possibly indicating that plants redirected their resources from leaves in response to herbivory. Our results demonstrate how diverse responses to herbivores can contribute to the diversity of plant defensive strategies.

For more, see Priscila´s recent paper:
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1002/ece3.10123

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