by Tel Aviv (Reuters) provides information that plants and insects interact with sound, researchers from Tel Aviv University said on Tuesday and opened a new border in the study of acoustic communication in nature.
The study published in the magazine Elife suggests that moth motten recognizes ultrasound -notaries that are emitted by dehydrated tomato systems and use this information to decide where to lay your eggs.
Moths usually lay their eggs on tomato plants to supply their larvae after hatching food.
Research was led by Rya Seltzer and Guy Zer Eshel in the Laboratoriums Yossi Yovel and Lilach Hadany, both professors at the Weisen Faculty of Biosciences at the University.
“We have revealed the first evidence of the acoustic interaction between an system and an insect,” said the team in a explanation.
The results build on earlier examinations of the group, which showed that plants release ultrasound noise when stressed.
The discovery could have an impact on agriculture and pest control and open up opportunities for the management of harvesting and insect behavior through sound.
While the ultrasound noise emitted by plants are outside of human hearing, they can be absorbed by many insects and some mammals such as bats.
The researchers examined this preference and presented two healthy tomato plants female moths – one with a speaker who was registered by a dry plant and one that was still.
The moths preferred the silent option, which indicates that they use these information in order to identify optimal areas for laying eggs.
Other experiments confirmed that the decisions of the moths were specially made by sound and only led by the plants on noise.
“Here we saw that there are animals that are able to understand these noises,” said Hadany.
“We think this is only the beginning. Therefore, many animals react to different plants.”
(Writing by Crispian Balmer; Editor of Bernadette Baum)
