Do plants communicate with different dialects?

Animals are widely recognized to communicate with other members of their species: signalling danger, marking territory, and finding food.  Recent work has recognized that a broad range of organisms – including plants – also send, receive, and respond to a rich suite of signals from their conspecifics. Many plants emit chemical 'screams' in response to herbivory that can attract predators and induce defences on herbivore-free neighbouring plants. However, one of the apparent paradoxes of plant communication is how plants that emit or receive public VOC signals avoid exploitation by competitors.

Figure 1-3: 1. Artificial leaf damage in Phaseolus lunatus 2. Cerotoma ruficornis feeding on P. lunatus 3. Mimicking leaf damage in Phaseolus lunatus

Using Phaseolus lunatus as a study model, we demonstrated that receiver plants responded using population-specific “dialects” where only receivers from the same source population as the damaged emitters suffered less leaf damage upon exposure to the volatile signals. This volatile specificity where emitters can privatize their signals and receivers avoid costly defence induction when signals are less likely to indicate a true threat of damage communication suggests that communication in plants can evolve specificity akin to language dialects, similar to those observed in the songs of birds and other animals.