This smell! She didn't know where it came from or what it mean. Nevertheless, it did something to her. Suddenly making babies wasn't a great idea as it was before. Maybe she should move out? Aphids (plant louses) are a pain for any gardener: they devitalize plants by sucking their sap. But what we can do against these hordes of plant vampires? Ladybugs and aphid lions are known predators. But how many aphids a single bug should eat in order to produce serious damage to the aphid colony size? Actually the reduction of prey number is not only a cause of the hunting of the predator. It is the fear which the predator produces, which makes prey life hard and reduces the mood for producing offspring. Mohammad Shadi Khudr et al.(2017) explored the effect of predator clues on aphid reproduction rate. Of course, the living predator (aphid lion) was most successful but although dead aphid lion bodys and sprayed or earth-injected aphid lion smoothies (which transfer the predator smell) were able to reduce the number of aphid offspring. Of course, the fear-effect of the naïve aphids (which never saw an aphid lion before) variied between the individuals but all in all it is good to know that already the smell may reduce the number of the plant-vampires and that most aphids prefer plants with no predator clues. Unfortunately, the paper doesn't explain why reproduction success declines when predators seem to be around, although this is a prey response which was observed in different studies and different organisms. Maybe it is a sort of strategy, or it is just the result of the stress. Taking home message: If you have problems with aphids in your garden: buy aphid lions... dead or alive (but alive is preferred). "Fear of predation alters clone-specific performance in phloem-feeding prey."
Mouhammad Shadi Khudr, et al. Scientific Reports 7 (2017).
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IdeaI love to increase my general science knowledge by reading papers from different fields of science. Here I share some of them. Archiv
März 2018
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