【英语时差8,16】黄蜂和玫瑰的对话

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Have you ever started talking to someone, only to discover you have nothing in common and, therefore, nothing to say?  

You might imagine that a yellow jacket, flying about its waspy business, and a rose bush, intent on growing green leaves in the sun, would be in a similar fix: nothing in common, nothing to say. Actually, rose bushes and other plants have a time honored method of communicating with yellow jackets and other wasps².

 

A yellow jacket's waspy business is probably finding food. One of the things it likes to eat is nice, juicy caterpillars³. The caterpillar⁴, of course, likes to eat nice, green leaves. So you see, the plant and the yellow jacket have something in common after all: The plant is eaten by the very thing the wasp¹ likes to eat.

 

Yellow jackets have good eyes for spotting caterpillars and other prey⁵, but a plant that is being eaten doesn't want to just wait around for the wasp to notice. Fortunately for your roses, evolution has provided the plant with its very own distress⁶ signal, based on smell. When a caterpillar chomps⁷ into a leaf, the plant releases an acid that smells the same as fresh cut grass. The caterpillar's bites also spill a kind of alcohol from the damaged leaf cells. This alcohol mixes with the cut grass aroma⁸ and carries it upward in a rising plume⁹ where it can be smelled by our circling yellow jacket. Millions of years of evolution have taught the yellow jacket that following this smell often leads to a delicious meal.

 

So what do wasps and roses talk about? They talk about what's for lunch.

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