kairomone

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English

WOTD – 10 November 2022

Etymology

A great spruce bark beetle (Dendroctonus micans). Bark beetles produce pheromones to communicate with each other, but some of these act as kairomones which draw predatory beetles to feed on them.

Blend of Ancient Greek καιρός (kairós, “advantage; profit”, noun) + English pheromone,[1] coined in the 1970 article “Allomones and Kairomones: Transspecific Chemical Messengers” by the American geneticist William Lacy Brown, Jr. (1913–1991), the German-American ecologist and entomologist Thomas Eisner (1929–2011), and the American ecologist Robert Harding Whittaker (1920–1980) which was published in BioScience: see the quotation.

Pronunciation

Noun

kairomone (plural kairomones)

  1. (biochemistry, ecology) Any substance produced by an individual of one species (often an insect) that benefits the recipient which is of a different species but is harmful to the producer.
  • 1973 December, L. B. Hendry, P. D. Greany, R. J. Gill, “Kairomone Mediated Host‐finding Behavior in the Parasitic Wasp Orgilus lepidus”, in Entomologia Experimentalis et Applicata, volume 16, number 4, Amsterdam: Nederlandse Entomologische Vereniging [Netherlands Entomological Society], →DOI, →ISSN, →OCLC, abstract, page 471:
    Host‐finding by the parasitic wasp Orgilus lepidus, a braconid parasite, is mediated by two kairomones present in the frass of the host insect, the potato tuberworm.
  • 2000 August, D. J. Brothers, G Tschuch, F. Burger, “Associations of Mutillid Wasps (Hymenoptera, Mutillidae) with Eusocial Insects”, in Insectes Sociaux, volume 47, Heidelberg: Birkhäuser Verlag for the International Union for the Study of Social Insects, →DOI, →ISSN, →OCLC, pages 201–211:
    Mutillids apparently use odour signals (kairomones) while actively running in suitable locations for finding such hosts, and must spend much time searching, with little prospect of finding numerous hosts.

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    References

    1. ^ Compare “kairomone, n.”, in OED Online Paid subscription required⁠, Oxford, Oxfordshire: Oxford University Press, June 2020; “kairomone, n.”, in Lexico, Dictionary.com; Oxford University Press, 2019–2022.

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