We frankly do not know, but we have a theory, which came out of a conversation with a researcher working in Georgia who was working on understanding the immunity system in plants.
The immunity system in plants is a polysaccharide response which is a totally different process where the sap responds to the animal attacks by forming a recognition system where by initiating a polysaccharide response that apparently takes 10 to 20 days for immunity system in plants.
After 10 to 20 days the immune system becomes active throughout the plants system. At that point any eggs layed on the plant that hatch and begin eating the plant triggers the polysaccharides immune system which releases anti microbial compounds (generally polysaccharides) which somehow block or interfere with the metabolism of the cells involved.
After triggering the release of polysaccharide based response to tissue “similar” to immunoproteins formed within animals when inoculated with specific tissue profiles of bacteria , viruses, etc…
Plants have an immune system that perceives or recognizes pathogenic or potentially beneficial bacteria and apparently insects, so the signal transaction and the responses that the plant produces resemble features of innate immunity observed in animals.
Plant reactions are various and include the production of anti microbial compounds (generally polysaccharides) which somehow block or interfere with the metabolism of the cells involved.
Bacteria that are successful in establishing pathogenic or symbiotic interactions have developed multiple ways to protect themselves.
The general importance of bacterial surface polysaccharides in the evasion of plant immune responses and illistrates their role in protecting symbiotic bacteria against toxic reactive oxygen species during invasion of the host plant.
This is my interpretation of the basic ideas transmitted to me by the Georgia research person.
Anyway I had a background in Biological control of insects and I was hacking out a living by trying to help farmers to use biological control methods instead of dangerous chemicals when all of the State people were screaming spray spray before the insects or mites get out of control. At the time, I was living in Archer Florida and had a garden where I had planted tomatoes, okra, beans and assorted other plants which were being attacked by various insects and mites.
At that time I had an insectory where I raised about a million housefly larvae (maggots)a week and exposed them to parasitic wasp which injected about 80 percent of the larvae with eggs that hatched inside of the maggots and began feeding on the maggots(without killing them) and formed pupae inside of them which hatched out inside the fly pupae which were kept alive until the larval stage of the wasp was finished and the wasp larvae formed their own cocoons inside of the fly larvae’s cocoons..
I also Raised bean plants in water tables inside of screened areas which I exposed to red spider mites and allowed then to infest the plants until they began to weave their spidery webs all over each plant . At that point I introduced predatory mites which loved to eat spider mites and left them there until they had matured and began to lay eggs threwout the plants on the leaves, I then harvested the leaves which had active predators an spider nit eggs and took these infested leaves to farmers fields and distributed them in the beans or strawberries or okra plants which assured a situation where the predator mites always had spider mites for food but kept them under control so the damage to the plants was minimal, and the farmers got better crops.
Another thing i usually did during my trips through the fields checking the insect and mite populations was to watch for sluggish larval insects that are either parasitized by wasp, or dying from bacterial, nematode or other infections.
Whenever I found one U woud place it into a pill bottleand snap the lid down and put the dying insect into my “bag” so could take them home and put them on observation shelves until eithe the parasytic wasp emerged inide the pill bottle or the fungous would sprout or the body would melt into a slomy pool of bacteria or nematodes.
At that time Bacillus thuringiensis had become a commen tool for controling lepidoptera ()butterfly and moth larvae (catapillars) of all kinds.
Some commen plant pest from these groups are corn ear worms, army worms and cut worms. Since I was very involved with finding tools that the home gardener could use and since I had written a recent article on the aphid lion (the larval stage of the green lace wing) I was invited to co-author an article on how to use natural biocontrol items to enhance or improve pest control in peoples own garden and their neighbors.
I wrote the article in which I suggested that people use the same process of saving sick larvae and when any of them puddeled into a slimy mess to take the remains and put them in a blending the heck out of it with about a quart of water and then and then pouring the mixture through cheese cloth and pouring the filtered mixture into a sprayer and spraying the concotion onto their garden vegatables.
I thought that this would spread the infecting spores or cells to any insect larvae that happened to be on the plants.
I then suggested that they not spray any of the mixture where they could breath it in and that they should wash the blender good and put some clorox in the water used to clean the blender.
I advised caution just in case some bacteri or other pathogen happend to be able to infect humans.
Anyway, several months after the article was published in Organic Gardens A lady wrote back that she had tried the bug juice spray on some grape leaf skeletonizer, so called because they would only eat the parts of the leaves between the network of veins in the leaves. Leafing a leaf with very littlestructure that looked like a net work
At that time I had not talked to anyone in the research of pest insects and so had not a clue of how bug juice worked.
In fact her letter started me thinking about just what was happening and was the success different for different pest or was it successful across the board.
So I asked Organic Gaedening magazine if we could run a sort of national tst by asking everyone who woul keep records if they would take the pages out of the magazine which asked each person what insect they were trying the Bug juice method on and mail the results back to the magazine.
The public response was great with several thousand result mailed back.
When we colated the results we found that the bug juice method worked uniformly well for nearly all of th catapillar pest, about 70 % of aphids and scale infestations. And almost no Stink bug positive results.
A quick examination of the results seem to say that it worked well on 95% protection from insects that chewed the leaf portion of a plant(catapillars, cut worms, etc.) (lepidoptera)of the plants,
OK protection 80% for those insects that stuck a small beak into a plant (aphids and scales) and 0 to 10% for stinkbugs, and almost zero for beetles (coleoptera)
When caterpillars feed on maize (Zea maize L.) lines with native resistance to several Lepidopteran pests, a defensive cysteine protease, Mir1-CP, rapidly accumulates at the wound site. Mir1-CP has been shown to inhibit caterpillar growth in vivo by attacking and permeabilizing the insect’s peritrophic matrix (PM), a structure that surrounds the food bolus, assists in digestion and protects the midgut from microbes and toxins. PM permeabilization weakens the caterpillar defenses by facilitating the movement of other insecticidal proteins in the diet to the midgut microvilli and thereby enhancing their toxicity.
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MIKE SIPE
I am 70 as of August 4th 2010. I have spent over 41 years Breeding tilapia, improving tilapia gene lines creating Red tilapia, and improving the body form of "pennyfish" from 24% in 1963 to 50% in 2009. I have pioneered and installed high oxygen intensive aquaculture production systems. We (TILAPIA AQUACULTURE INTERNATIONAL) built the first u-tube used to control oxygen and co2 levels in aquaculture. We can dissolve up to 800 parts per million parts of water and thereby control oxygen levels in growing situations. ( THIS IS WHAT MAKES OUR INTENSIVE CULTURE SYSTEM WORK SO WELL) We have designed hatchery systems to produce thousand of pennyfish fingerlings a day using breeder cages. We have helped to establish the production of over two billion pounds per year of our tilapia in over 50 locations in North America, Mexico, South America, Central America, Kenya Africa, and Saudi Aribea in the Middle east. Our goal is to help people with the production of tilapia necessary to *feed everyone* in the world a well balanced nutritious* diet, and to restore the forest of the world. If you wish to talk with me my phone number is 877 217 7006. Please feel free to call me during normal Eastern daylight times. At this particular time I believe that I have more hands on experience in building , designing and running u-tubes to lower the cost and risk for growing all kinds of Aquaculture by 10% - 20% and the cost of dissolving oxygen in an intensive system by 50- 85%. The safety issue is by far the most important issue because having complete control over the oxygen level in a tank helps to assure he safety of the crop and the cost. Another area where I have extensive experience is on what is required to create new characteristics in a gene line. We can take a tilapia that is black and turn it to a brilliant red or take a gene line and select for various body form changes or various internal genetics needed needed to manufacture certain expensive biochemical products..such as Heparin which is an important molecule in haemoglobin that plays a role in clotting blood. A good breeding and selection system could virtually increase the production of almost any biological chemical system in the tilapia.Where Am I:
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