Abstract
Diel rhythms in larval foraging and hiding influence the timing of herbivore damage to plants and exposure to both predators and parasitoids. Since host-plant volatiles provide time-of-day information, it is essential to understand how larvae use the information in their diel rhythms. We investigated the effects of plant volatiles on the hiding behavior in Mythimna unipuncta larvae by focusing on (1) rearing history, (2) larval density, and (3) developmental stage under laboratory conditions. (1) Rearing history: the proportion of hiding behavior of the third instars from the new colony were significantly affected by volatiles, whereas those from the old colony were not. (2) Larval density: the effect of volatiles on the proportion of the third instars differed significantly between the low- and high-density groups. (3) Developmental stage: the second instars used plant volatiles in their hiding behavior under both light and dark conditions, while the effect of volatiles on hiding behavior of the fifth–sixth instars differed between light and dark conditions. These results show that hiding behavior in M. unipuncta larvae is shaped not only by light but also by the effects of plant volatiles, larval rearing history, social context (density), and developmental states.
Subjects
- Ecology
- Zoology
Acknowledgements
We would like to thank Dr. Rika Ozawa for her comments on the experiments.
Funding
This work was supported by Transformative Research Areas (23H04965 and 23H04965) from the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science (JSPS) to Kaori Shiojiri, and by Grants-in-Aid for Scientific Research (No. 22H00425) from JSPS to Junji Takabayashi.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding authors
Ethics declarations
Competing interests
The authors declare no competing interests.
Consent to participate
Not applicable.
Consent for publication
Not applicable.
Ethical approval
Not applicable.
Additional information
Publisher’s note
Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.
Supplementary Information
Below is the link to the electronic supplementary material.
Supplementary Material 1 (download XLSX )
Rights and permissions
Open Access This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License, which permits any non-commercial use, sharing, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if you modified the licensed material. You do not have permission under this licence to share adapted material derived from this article or parts of it. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/.
Reprints and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Shiojiri, K., Uefune, M., McNeil, J. et al. Rearing history, larval density, and larval developmental stage affect volatile- and light-mediated diel hiding behavior in Mythimna unipuncta.
Sci Rep (2026). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-026-57854-y
Received:
Accepted:
Published:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-026-57854-y
Keywords
- Diel hiding behavior
- Plant volatiles
- Domestication
- Larval density
- Developmental stages
Source: Ecology - nature.com
