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Plants Can Turn Caterpillars Into Cannibals To Avoid Getting Eaten (nationalgeographic.com.au)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from National Geographic: A new study published in the Nature Ecology and Evolution journal found that when some plants are under attack from hungry herbivores, they emit defenses that make themselves incredibly foul-tasting to caterpillars, which spurs the caterpillars to eat each other. "Plants can defend themselves so much that they food-stress the herbivore, and then the herbivores determine that rather than have plants on their menu, they should have caterpillars at the top of their menu," said John Orrock, the author of the study and a researcher in the Department of Zoology at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. Orrock and his research team sprayed tomato plants with methyl jasmonate -- a substance plants produce in response to environmental stresses -- to trigger the plants' defense mechanisms. This chemical allowed the plant to change its chemistry, which made it less appetizing to the beet armyworm caterpillars that were placed on a treated plant. This phenomenon has been documented in a variety of plants, and research has suggested that plants can sense when surrounding plants are under attack, which can spur the production of methyl jasmonate in entire communities of plants.
That's the same the rich do with the poor: convince them that they are, somehow richer than others, thus turning them against each other (instead of eating the -- far more nutritional! rich).
Humans are idiots (myself included, mind you).
My understanding is that cabbages can also sense when they're under attack. They emit a chemical signal that attracts wasps, who then feast on the herbivore invaders. Pretty cool, evolutionary warfare. It's led to some extraordinary adaptations in nature's brutal eat or be eaten battle arena.
Irony: Agile development has too much intertia to be abandoned now.
"Plants Can Turn Caterpillars Into Cannabis To Avoid Getting Eaten!"
. . . but, being that I'm watching a story on the news where folks who got caught tossing Molotov cocktails just got released because they have sympathizers in the Hamburg government . . . everything seems a wee bit surreal today.
Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
Studies build on earlier studies. That's how science progresses. The induced cannibalism in the caterpillars is the new discovery in this case.
If you weren't in such a hurry to dismiss the article as unworthy, you might have noticed your link doesn't mention anything about induced cannibalism.
While it is cool that plants have defense mechanisms against herbivores, the claim that the plants are "turning caterpillars into cannibals" is a bit of a stretch. Caterpillars are already cannibalistic in a pinch. All the plant does is make itself taste bad. If I only have meat and vegetables in my refrigerator and all the meat spoils first, then my choice to eat vegetables does not imply that meat's tendency to spoil faster turns me into a vegetarian.
Our real enemy will be the humble potato and in one fell swoop everyone with a hankering for french fries or potato chips will become a zombie.
My $0.02 will always be worth more than your â0.02, so