When we were young, we often saw some abnormal swelling on the leaves or rhizomes of some plants. If you open these lumps, you will find that there is a “hermit” inside, which is the larva of some kind of insect. And those lumps are insects.
Insects are also dubbed as “houses” built by parasites on plants. Just like human houses can shelter from wind and rain, parasites wrap themselves or their own eggs in insects, also to form protective covers. Easy to eat.
The unique “architect”,
although the insects can be found in many parts of the plant, such as leaves, bark, trunks and roots and other nutrient-rich parts, are more favored by parasites. But “architects” – worms are very specific, usually only in one tissue, one plant, and at most only in similar plant species.
In addition to being single-minded, larvae have a unique method of building a house. They produce certain chemical secretions on plant tissues during spawning or feeding. This secretion can cause local growth in plants. The increase in hormones causes the cells to accelerate their division and eventually grow into a deformed tumor.
According to observation experiments, when the worms begin to develop, even if the worms leave, the formation of the worms is not affected, so the worms should essentially be a kind of response of the plants to the larval secretions, that is, the real worms. The builder is actually the plant itself. The popular saying is that the insects are architects, the host plants are contractors, and the architects hand over the house design drawings to the contractor. The rest of the work is done by the contractor. The follow-up work has nothing to do with the architect. It is.
Happy childhood
back when gall formation, the larvae grow and develop on the inside, they can learn from plant nutrients in this cozy “house” in the outside world while avoid predation predators and bad weather, a pleasant childhood Until you mature, leave.
Because the production of worms is a good shelter and feeding place for the offspring of insects, the worms are not only morphologically diverse, but also a special trophic layer of cells in the worms. This layer of cells is rich in various kinds. Organic and inorganic nutrition, the parasites that live in it feed on this special trophic layer of cells, so that worms are generally rich in nutrients.
Medicinal value – gall
galls blocked the plant uptake of water and nutrients, so a lot of gall can lead to plant death. In the Shandong, Liaoning and other places in China, the grape root nodules on the grapes were once propagated. They mainly form insects in the roots of the grapes, which seriously affects the absorption of water and nutrients by the grapes, resulting in low seed setting rate and even destruction of the root tissues, causing the whole plants to die. The mango producing areas in Nanning, Guangxi, China suffer from such violations every year. If they are not guarded, the damage rate will reach 100%.
However, the world is on both sides, and the insects that endanger the growth of plants are not useless. Since the chemical substances contained in the body, such as fat, protein, starch, and trace elements, are concentrated in the insects, people began picking insects and using them as early as BC.
The traditional blue-black ink used in the early Western countries was made by extracting the components of the oak worm in the oak tree. The most famous example of the development and utilization of worms in Chinese medicine is gallnut, which is formed by the parasitic worm on the salted wood. Insects, traditional medicine treats them as astringents and hemostatics.
