Insects store ‘voicemail’ messages in soil through plants

Washington -  Scientists had already revealed that insects could use plants as ‘green phones’ for communication with other bugs.

Now, a new study has shown that through those same plants insects are also able to leave ‘voicemail’ messages in the soil.

Herbivorous insects store their voicemails via their effects on soil fungi.

Researchers from the Netherlands Institute of Ecology (NIOO-KNAW) and Wageningen University (WUR) discovered this unique messaging service in the ragwort plant.

A few years ago, NIOO scientists discovered that soil-dwelling and aboveground insects are able to communicate with each other using the plant as a telephone.

Insects eating plant roots change the chemical composition of the leaves, causing the plant to release volatile signals into the air. This can convince aboveground insects to select another food plant in order to avoid competition and to escape from poisonous defence compounds in the plant. But the impact doesn’t stop there.

The new research showed that insects leave a specific legacy that remains in the soil after they have fed on a plant. And future plants growing on that same spot can pick up these signals

from the soil and pass them on to other insects. Those messages are really specific: the new plant can tell whether the former one was suffering from leaf-eating caterpillars or from

root-eating insects.

“The new plants are actually decoding a ‘voicemail’ message from the past to the next generation of plant-feeding insects, and their enemies. The insects are re-living the past,” said NIOO

researcher and first author Olga Kostenko.

This message from the past strongly influences the growth and possibly also the behaviour of these bugs. Today’s insect community is influenced by the messages from past seasons.

Kostenko and her colleagues grew ragwort plants in a greenhouse and exposed them to leaf-eating caterpillars or root-feeding beetle larvae. Then they grew new plants in the same soil and

exposed them to insects again.

“What we discovered is that the composition of fungi in the soil changed greatly and depended on whether the insect had been feeding on roots or leaves,” explained Kostenko.

“These changes in fungal community, in turn, affected the growth and chemistry of the next batch of plants and therefore the insects on those plants,” he stated.

Growth and palatability of new plants in the same soil thus mirrored the condition of the previous plant. In this way, a new plant can pass down the soil legacy or message from the past to

caterpillars and their enemies.

“How long are these voicemail messages kept in the soil? That’s what I also would like to know!” said Kostenko.

“We’re working on this, and on the question of how widespread this phenomenon is in nature,” he added.

The research project was financed by a personal innovation grant of the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO) to Martijn Bezemer from the NIOO.

These results will soon be published in the influential journal Ecology Letters,