In order to survive, pests will also "gang up"

Science and Technology Daily News (reporter Qu Jian) reporter recently learned from the Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences (hereinafter referred to as the "Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences") that the "genetically modified crop safety evaluation and management" team of the Institute of Plant Protection of the Academy of Sciences revealed the rice pest brown planthopper with the help of dihua borer induced rice volatiles, circumventing the ecology and biochemical mechanism 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 were recently published online in the biological science journal eLife.

According to Li Yunhe, a researcher at the Institute of Plant Protection of the Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences, in the long-term co-evolution of plants and insects, some pest-induced plant volatiles will be used by insects that feed on live plants, thereby improving the survival rate and reproduction rate of these insects themselves. In a previous study, the team had identified a significant feeding and spawning preference for rice plants infested with dimorphs, but the study at the time did not determine what the intrinsic driver of this preference behavior was.

Researchers speculate that brown planthoppers prefer to share host plants with dimorphs, possibly related to evading predators. Based on this hypothesis, the team further found that when brown planthoppers are used alone to harm rice, the induced rice volatiles have a significant lure effect on rice lice wasps, while when the dimorphic borer is harmful to rice, the induced rice volatiles have a significant repulsive effect on rice lice wasps; when brown planthoppers and dimorphic planthoppers share host rice, the volatiles produced by rice have a significantly reduced lure effect on rice lice wasps, or even reversed to rejection. Greenhouse and field trials have confirmed that after brown planthoppers share host rice with dimorphic borers, the parasitic rate of brown planthopper eggs on the rice by the tassel is reduced by up to 80%.

From this, the researchers concluded that the volatiles released by the dicarbonated borer as harmful rice plants had a significant repulsive effect on the rice lice wasps, and the brown planthopper took advantage of this feature to choose to cohabit with the dimorphic borer on the same host plant to escape its natural enemy rice lice wasp.

The study was selected as a top 15% paper by the journal Life, 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.