Appel and Cocroft

Appel and Cocroft

David Sparks Ph.D.
David Sparks Ph.D.
University of Missouri researcher, Dr. Heidi Appel is a plant scientist and her colleague Dr. Rex Cocroft,  who’s in Biological Sciences are collaborating on a project that is looking very carefully at how plant eating insects communicate with each other and, remarkably, how plants respond to the sounds that are produced by insect predators. I overheard them on an NPR show and called them up. What a fascinating story that they have to tell. We start with Dr. Appel: “People have known for a long time that plants can respond to sound. People play music to plants, single tones to plants, and found differences in plant growth, plant seed germination, the expression of genes in plants but we never knew why plants would have this ability. What our work has shown for the first time is that plants can respond to a force of vibration that is ecologically relevant to them and respond with something that is useful to them which is increases in chemical defenses. Give me an idea of how you found that out. The idea came out of a conversation that Heidi and I had when we first met. I study communication in insects that live on plants and use the plants as a communications channel. They send vibrations through the tissues of their host plants and this can be picked up by other insects on the same plant. In most of the species that use some kind of sound communication in insects, the vast majority use by substrate form of communication, most of them are communicating through plants.
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