Tomato Plants Can Turn Caterpillars Into

Cannibals
By Nathaniel Scharping | July 10, 2017 2:24 pm

A spurge hawk-moth caterpillar. (Credit: Chekaramit/Shutterstock)

Its a twist of fate that wouldnt feel out of place in a horror movie: A platoon
of caterpillars, young and hungry, descend on a defenseless tomato plant to feast, but
as they begin to eat something goes terribly wrong. The leaves no longer satisfy, and
they turn on each other in a cannibalistic frenzy feeding wildly until just one, sated
and content, remains.

You can read it as a Carrie-like moral parable, perhaps, but bringing out caterpillars
carnivorous tendencies is just sound strategy on the part of tomato plants. Rooted and
immobile, plants are easy targets for hungry insects, and theyve had to develop other
means of defense like causing their predators to go on the offensive against each
other. Plants across the family tree emit an array of defensive compounds to protect
themselves some simply make them less inviting, while others cause more insidious
effects, such as calling parasitic wasps to lay eggs in the attackers. This happens to be
one of the morecolorfuldefenses.

Come On, You Know You Want To

In the case of the tomato plants, theyre simply exploiting a weakness that already
exists in their enemy. When under attack they release a compound known as methyl
jasmonate that both signals other plants in the vicinity to be on guard and gives their
leaves a noxious taste. Caterpillars are known to turn on each other for sustenance
when the going gets rough, and by making themselves unpalatable, the tomato plants
encourage this behavior.

Cannibalistic caterpillars and proactive plants have been documented for some time,
but it wasnt until now that a researcher put the two together. John Orrock, a
researcher at the University of Wisconsin-Madison sprayed tomato plants with
varying concentrations of methyl jasmonate and put them in containers with beet
armyworms, a common agricultural pest. The more of the compound each plant had
been doused with, the quicker the caterpillars turned to cannibalism. Control plants,
on the other hand, werent able to mount a defense quickly enough and their leaves
were totally eaten. On those plants, the caterpillars lived in harmony with one another,
spared the gruesome fate of their hungry counterparts.

The plants actions work on two levels: they keep the caterpillars away from their
leaves, and they reduce the total number of caterpillars as well. The strategy isnt
totally effective, because some caterpillars survive and those that do are typically
exceptionally well-fed and more likely to survive. The study was published Monday in
the journal Nature Ecology and Evolution.

Orrock hopes that his findings will lead to new strategies for pest control in agriculture,
and says that they could elucidate some of the ways that pathogens move through
insect populations.

This strategy might not work so well in the real world either, where caterpillars arent
confined to a single plant and can simply move to the next one if the first doesnt agree
with them. In addition, the tomato plants natural release of methyl jasmonate proved
to be too slow to halt the caterpillars mandibles by the time they had released the
chemical in sufficient amounts, they had already been eaten.

One plants sacrifice may be enough to save the rest of the group, however. Compounds
like methyl jasmonate function as signals to other plants, telling them to begin
preparing their own defense. When the caterpillars arrive, they may be in for a nasty
surprise.

http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/d-brief/2017/07/10/cannibal-caterpillars-tomato-
plants/#.WafjU_MjG01