
Host plants tell insects when to grow longer wings and migrate - dnetesn
https://phys.org/news/2018-07-host-insects-longer-wings-migrate.html
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rolha-capoeira
The article is interesting so I don't mean to nitpick, but I find the title
disingenuous/misleading to the layperson. Being in a country that has still
not completely accepted the concept of natural selection, phrasing like this
is counter-productive. The insects have evolved in such a way that their
growth is determined by the glucose level of the host plant. This is much
simpler to understand, IMO.

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j_b_s
Completely agree. From the article:

"It's all about the amount of glucose, or sugar, in the plant," Lavine said.
"Rice plants with higher glucose levels are older and dying. That increase in
glucose causes adolescent brown planthoppers to develop into the long-winged
adults. The plant really is telling the insect how to grow."

The last sentence is just bad.

If plants had their way, they'd be telling the insect pests to GTFO from the
get-go. The whole point is that plant sugar levels are an inevitable and
reliable indicator of host status, with higher [glucose] indicating poor (and
deteriorating) host quality. Evolution (in insect pest populations) by natural
selection has led to insect populations evolving plastic developmental
programs (Stay-or-go, via wing size) in response to that inevitable and
reliable signal of deteriorating host quality.

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natecavanaugh
I agree with both of you, but I'm not sure if the plants don't want the
insect, since this could be a symbiotic relationship and there's some benefit
to the plant.

But the conclusion that the plant is "telling" the insect something, rather
than the insect adapting to changing conditions seems like a huge stretch.
It's not like everytime an oil well dries up Mother Earth is telling us to
start looking for other oil wells.

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resu_nimda
I think it actually is pretty common for people to refer to certain natural
events as "mother nature" "telling" us something. I think it really just
depends on how strict your definition of "tell" is and your take on
anthropomorphization. "Tell" might be something only humans can do or it might
be more generally any signal from some entity that induces behavior in a
living organism.

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natecavanaugh
> I think it actually is pretty common for people to refer to certain natural
> events as "mother nature" "telling" us something.

True though it should be a shorthand, convenient way of saying it, but I've
seen it derail many a discussion when people get hung up on the abstract
aspect.

> "Tell" might be something only humans can do or it might be more generally
> any signal from some entity that induces behavior in a living organism.

That's where it gets interesting because many times (though definitely not
all), many of our communication is biologically or environmentally driven, so
it's often tough even among humans what we're truly trying to communicate.
It's a fascinating interplay between different parts of ourselves that we're
trying to express :)

