Ecologist Roxina Soler and her team from the Dutch Institute of Ecology have discovered that insects that live underground and those that grow on the surface can communicate through plants . To turn vegetables into "green telephones," animals generate chemical warning signals that spread through the leaves. Thanks to these messages, if a plant is occupied by an insect that eats roots, the insects on the surface are alerted that the plant already has a tenant underground . In this way they avoid unnecessarily competing for the same plant.
At the moment, this form of communication has only been described in some habitats, and it is not yet clear to what extent the phenomenon is widespread among insects.
