Oct

8

It's only a flesh wound…as Monty Python would say.

I thought this was a great article about chemical codes and signaling amongst plants.

"Learning to Speak Shrub":

'Entomologist Richard Karban knows how to get sagebrush talking. To start the conversation, he poses as a grasshopper or a chewing beetle—he uses scissors to cut leaves on one of the shrubs. Lopping off the leaves entirely won't fool the plants. So he makes many snips around the edges and tips of the leaves—"a lot of little bites."

A few months later, Karban, a professor at the University of California, Davis who studies plant defense communication, returns to the sagebrush and examines its leaves, many of which now have damage from real grasshoppers or beetles. However, within about two feet of the branches he clipped, leaves have been spared the worst ravages of the hungry insects. That's because Karban's cuttings convinced those damaged leaves they were under insect attack, so they sent chemical alarms into the air. Neighboring leaves intercepted and deciphered the code messages, and began prepping their own defenses against the bugs.

It makes me wonder what pheromones the markets release?


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