Agriculture Reference
In-Depth Information
Insects
Insects sense their surroundings with their antennae. That's how they find a mate and
how they find their food. These antennae interpret electromagnetic frequencies in the in-
frared spectrum, which is right beside the visual light spectrum we can see.
For example, a female moth emits pheromones in the infrared spectrum that a male inter-
prets as a suitable “mate” for them. The males don't go chasing the females around for
miles and miles with their eyes. They follow these pheromones and home in on them like I
used to do as an airplane pilot following the signal from a radar beacon.
Plants also emit pheromones that insects interpret as “food” for them. Not all plants emit
these pheromones, though. It turns out that only
sick
plants emit them in such a manner as
to be seen as food! This finding has the most amazing implications for organic gardeners
and farmers. Healthy plants simply don't emit these signals, so insects don't see healthy
plants as a food source. Even if they do land on a healthy plant, for the most part, they
don't have the enzymes to digest it.
Why do sick plants invite predators to eat them? I don't think we know for sure. Some
people think the plants don't want to survive since it would be a detriment to their species.
If sick plants were to continually reproduce, the species wouldn't be as strong and would
have a much more difficult time surviving, so they “take one for the team,” so to speak. All
I know for sure is that insects eat sick plants.
As you may have noticed, most insects don't go around eating any plant species in their
path. They usually have just a few species or perhaps a family of plants that are their food
and they don't — they can't — eat anything else. That's why plant predator topics are often
organized by plant, because when you know the plant that's being eaten, it narrows down
the potential predators to just a handful. Each insect antennae are shaped in such a way to
collect only the frequencies from certain plants.
I think of insects as being like the cholesterol in our bodies — not all bad. Cholesterol
has come to be regarded as an enemy in human health, but the truth is that it's vital to our
health. It does all kinds of important things in our bodies. When it gets too high, we are
told to stop eating things like eggs because they are high in cholesterol (which makes very
little sense, but that's for another topic). We find a way to blame the cholesterol, when it is
just a symptom of a bigger problem. The same goes for plant predators. Their presence tells
us our plants are sick. It's not the predators fault.
