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Consistent individual variation in plant communication: do plants have personalities?

  • Plant-microbe-animal interactions – original research
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Abstract

Animal biologists have recently focused on individual variation in behavioral traits and have found that individuals of many species have personalities. These are defined as consistent intraspecific differences in behaviors that are repeatable across different situations and stable over time. When animals sense danger, some individuals will alert neighbors with alarm calls and both calling and responding vary consistently among individuals. Plants, including sagebrush, emit volatile cues when they are attacked by herbivores and neighbors perceive these cues and reduce their own damage. We experimentally transferred volatiles between pairs of sagebrush plants to evaluate whether individuals showed consistent variation in their effectiveness as emitters and as receivers of cues, measured in terms of reduced herbivore damage. We found that 64% of the variance in chewing damage to branches over the growing season was attributable to the identity of the individual receiving the cues. This variation could have been caused by inherent differences in the plants as well as by differences in the environments where they grew and their histories. We found that 5% of the variance in chewing damage was attributable to the identity of the emitter that provided the cue. This fraction of variation was statistically significant and could not be attributed to the environmental conditions of the receiver. Effective receivers were also relatively effective emitters, indicating consistency across different situations. Pairs of receivers and emitters that were effective communicators in 2018 were again relatively effective in 2019, indicating consistency over time. These results suggest that plants have repeatable individual personalities with respect to alarm calls.

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Fig. 1
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source of volatile cues for 10 different receiver plants. Cues from emitter plants were collected after experimentally clipping the branch

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Data availability

Data will be archived at Dryad Data (https://doi.org/10.5061/dryad.cfxpnvx6g).

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Acknowledgements

We thank Kate Laskowski and Andy Sih for insightful comments. This study was also greatly improved by our interactions with Denis Reale and Judy Stamps. We were supported by grants from the USDA (NC-7 and NE-2001) to RK, a Marie Curie postdoc grant 797898 to PGT, and a Fonds de Recherche du Quebec postdoc to CC.

Funding

We were supported by grants from the USDA (NC-7 and NE-2001) to RK, a Marie Curie grant 797898 to PGT, and a Fonds de Recherche du Quebec postdoc to CC.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Entomology and Nematology, University of California, Davis, CA, 95616, USA

    Richard Karban

  2. Department of Environmental Sciences, University of Eastern Finland, N70211, Kuopio, Finland

    Patrick Grof-Tisza

  3. Department of Biology, Chemistry and Geography, University of Quebec, Rimouski, QC, G5L 3A1, Canada

    Charline Couchoux

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  1. Richard Karban
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Contributions

RK and CC designed the study, RK and PGT conducted the experiments, PGT and RK analyzed the data, and RK wrote the manuscript with input from PGT.

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Correspondence to Richard Karban.

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Communicated by Diethart Matthies.

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Karban, R., Grof-Tisza, P. & Couchoux, C. Consistent individual variation in plant communication: do plants have personalities?. Oecologia 199, 129–137 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00442-022-05173-0

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