Facing the Future of Plant-Insect Interaction Research: Le Retour à la 'Raison d'être'

摘要

The interaction between herbivorous insects and the angiosperm plants they consume, collectively constituting the majority of macroscopic species in terrestrial communities, has often been metaphorically likened to warfare (e.g. Gonzalez and Nebert, 1990), and the process of reciprocating defense and counter defense has been called a coevolutionary arms race (Whittaker and Feeny, 1971). Few people probably realize, however, that this particular field of study arose as a direct consequence of an actual, rather than metaphorical, war. When World War II broke out, the Department of Zoology and Applied Entomology at Imperial College, London, was relocated to Slough and the Pest Infestation Laboratory was founded to aid in the war effort. Insect physiologist Gottfried Fraenkel undertook a study of the nutrition of stored product pests in an effort to gain insight into how to control them. In the process, he determined that, with only a few exceptions, human and insect nutritional requirements are essentially the same and that, moreover, the majority of green plants are essentially nutritionally equivalent (Fraenkel, 1953). This observation in turn led to speculation that nonnutritious substances, the so-called secondary substances idiosyncratically distributed throughout the plant kingdom, determine patterns of host plant utilization—"the enormous variety in the distribution and composition of the secondary plant substances, for which no comprehensive and plausible explanation then existed, accounted for the equally staggering variety of insect-food-plant relationships, by their acting as repellents and attractants for insects and other organisms" (Fraenkel, 1984, p. 1).