Work Performed and Main Achievements
During the project period, we conducted a series of integrated studies to investigate the role of acoustic cues in plant biology. These studies ranged from behavioral ecology to molecular biology and bioacoustics, contributing multiple lines of evidence to the emerging field of plant bioacoustics.
1. Plant acoustic signals and herbivore behavior
We examined the impact of plant-emitted sounds on herbivorous insects, focusing on oviposition behavior in female moths. Our experiments demonstrated that moths use ultrasonic sounds emitted by dehydrated plants as cues when selecting host plants. These results suggest that plant stress sounds can serve as informative signals in plant-insect interactions. While the findings underscore the ecological relevance of airborne sounds, they also highlighted methodological complexities such as context-dependence of moth responses.
2. Acoustic communication between pollinators and plants
We conducted detailed experiments exploring both sides of the acoustic interaction between plants and pollinators. First, we confirmed and expanded on earlier findings that plants increase nectar sugar concentration within minutes in response to pollinator wingbeat sounds. In this study, we performed a more comprehensive chemical analysis of the nectar’s composition in response to sound exposure. We also began investigating whether pollinators can detect and behaviorally respond to plant-emitted stress sounds in the field, which could have adaptive consequences for their foraging behavior and influence pollination success.
3. Construction of a plant airborne sound library
We recorded ultrasonic sounds emitted by plants under various stress conditions, including drought, physical injury and disease. These recordings serve as the foundation for the first systematic library of plant airborne sounds. This dataset supports future machine learning applications for sound classification, diagnostics, and stress detection.
4. Functional role of acoustic signaling in plant-plant communication
We initiated a comprehensive investigation into whether plants can sense and respond to the sounds emitted by other plants under stress, using a combination of automated plant phenotyping, acoustic recording, gene expression profiling, and metabolomic analysis.
These combined studies demonstrate a broad experimental framework for exploring acoustic signaling in plants, moving from ecological interactions to cellular and molecular responses.
