Summary
During foraging, natural enemies of herbivores may employ volatile allelochemicals that originate from an interaction of the herbivore and its host plant. The composition of allelochemical blends emitted by herbivore-infested plants is known to be affected by both the herbivore and the plant. Our chemical data add new evidence to the recent notion that the plants are more important than the herbivore in affecting the composition of the volatile blends. Blends emitted by apple leaves infested with spider mites of 2 different species,T. urticae andP. ulmi, differed less in composition (principally quantitative differences for some compounds) than blends emitted by leaves of two apple cultivars infested by the same spider-mite species,T. urticae (many quantitative and a few qualitative differences). Comparison between three plant species — apple, cucumber and Lima bean — reveals even larger differences between volatile blends emitted upon spider-mite damage (many quantitative differences and several qualitative differences).
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Takabayashi, J., Dicke, M. & Posthumus, M.A. Variation in composition of predator-attracting allelochemicals emitted by herbivore-infested plants: Relative influence of plant and herbivore. Chemoecology 2, 1–6 (1991). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF01240659
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BF01240659