Recently, the Institute of Plant Protection of the Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences revealed that the rice pest brown planthopper uses rice moth-induced rice volatiles to circumvent the ecology and biochemical mechanism of the parasitism of the agricultural beneficial insect rice lice wasps on their eggs, providing a new perspective for understanding the ecological function of "insect-induced plant volatiles" to regulate insect populations. The results of the research are published online in eLife.
According to Li Yunhe, the chief of the team, in the long-term co-evolution of plants and insects, insects that feed on plants actively or passively use pest-induced plant volatiles to regulate the dynamic changes of populations in different nutrient layers to improve their own survival rate and reproduction rate. In previous studies, the innovation team identified brown planthoppers as a significant preference for dicarbonate borers as pest rice plants, but further research showed that this behavior was not driven by the need to find quality food.
The dimorph borer provides an umbrella to the brown planthopper to help it fend off rice lice wasps
Predation or parasitic risk is an important factor influencing insect host selection, so the authors speculate that brown planthoppers' preference for sharing hosts with dimorphic borers may be related to evading their natural enemies. It was further found that the volatiles released by the dicarbonate borer as a pest of rice plants had a significant repulsive effect on the rice lice wasps, and the brown planthopper took advantage of this advantage to choose to cohabit with the dimorph borer in the same host plant to escape the parasitism of natural enemies, revealing the highly adapted spawning strategy of the brown planthopper. Based on the phenomenon of "planthoppers looking for borers to protect eggs" and its significance, the study was selected as a Top 15% paper by the journal "eLife", and invited well-known experts in the field to deeply interpret the theoretical value of the research results in plant-insect co-evolution and its practical significance in pest control.
The research has been funded by the National Natural Science Foundation of China and the Science and Technology Innovation Project of the Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences.