Subversion of alarm communication: Do plants habituate aphids to their own alarm signals?
Bibliographic record
Abstract
When attacked by a predator, pea aphids, Acyrthosiphon pisum, emit an alarm pheromone, (E)-β-farnesene, which causes nearby conspecifics to disperse from the area. However, herbivore-damaged plants also emit (E)-β-farnesene. We hypothesized that plants release farnesene to habituate aphids, i.e., to disrupt their alarm-pheromone responses, perhaps to reduce herbivory by increasing parasitoid or predator efficacy. Thus, we addressed two questions: (1) Do aphids habituate to (E)-β-farnesene, and (2) Are they habituated at levels produced by aphid-infested plants? On an artificial diet devoid of farnesene, aphids were exposed to 10 ng/cm 3 of (E)-β-farnesene or a hexane control over 24 h. Habituation was achieved, as dropping responses to 50 ng/cm 3 of (E)-β-farnesene decreased after exposure. We then exposed aphids to 0.8 ng/cm 3 of (E)-β-farnesene, a pheromone concentration emitted by plants, or a hexane control for 24 h. Their reaction to 38 ng/cm 3 of (E)-β-farnesene, the maximum pheromone concentration found in aphid-cornicle droplets, was not significantly different before and after exposure. Thus, our hypothesis that plants emit farnesene to disrupt aphid alarm communication remains unsupported.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".