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This episodes uses the "European spring forest" soundscape, which I made from INaturalist recordings. You can find the details credits on the dedicated page.
Picture yourself in an apple tree, comfortably resting against the inferior side of a leaf.
\[Forest/orchard soundscape fades in\]
You mother laid you here, picking the spot carefully. Or at least, trying to. You are just an egg now, but soon you will hatch into a small leafminer.
Hi and welcome to the Insect Insights, chill insect stories to relax and wonder, available wherever podcasts are. If you like this podcast, you can subscribe, leave a review and even an insect question, on spotify or on the website. I am Max, your host, and I hope you are ready to dive into insect knowledge for another insight!
A leaf miner, that’s what you are going to be. One could also call you a leaf hacker. Your kind surely hacked the system, broke some traditions, by eating leaves from the inside instead of outside. This way, you can eat only the yummy nutritious parts, and leave the rest! The soft inner tissue of the leaf, the parenchyma, that’s the ore of your mine.
This lifestyle does require you to be quite small, though. Your adult kinmates are not longer than 5 millimeter. You have to be thin enough to fit inside a leaf after all! You also have to be content with a single leaf for food, where bigger leaf eaters can devour dozens! Unlike these giants, you remain small, humble, concealed…
This hidden life has made you quite the trickster. Safe inside your leaf, you are capable of subtle manipulations… With the help of microbial partners, you can influence the local hormonal balance, to ensure your environment is ideal for you. You are a real little parasite, tweaking the signaling pathways for your benefit. A little more jasmonate here, a little less abscisic acid there, and a real shower of cytokinins.
You can even cheat death! Well, sort of. Interfering with the plant signals, you are able to elongate the life of your leaf for a time. Even as it rests on the ground, your little mine will still appear as a green island in the middle of this sea of yellow. Just long enough for your to complete your larval life! Then you will go on to pupate, and metamorphose yourself in a small, cute moth. A micro-lepidoptera.
Some cousins of yours, hosts of different plants, are even capable of tricking their hosts into growing whole organs for them, a gall. But for you, the normal leaf tissue is more than enough.
Sinclair, R. J.; Hughes, L. Leaf Miners: The Hidden Herbivores. Austral Ecology 2010, 35 (3), 300–313. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1442-9993.2009.02039.x.
Guiguet, A.; Ohshima, I.; Takeda, S.; Laurans, F.; Lopez-Vaamonde, C.; Giron, D. Origin of Gall-Inducing from Leaf-Mining in Caloptilia Micromoths (Lepidoptera, Gracillariidae). Sci Rep 2019, 9 (1), 6794. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-019-43213-7.
Zhang, H.; Dugé De Bernonville, T.; Body, M.; Glevarec, G.; Reichelt, M.; Unsicker, S.; Bruneau, M.; Renou, J.-P.; Huguet, E.; Dubreuil, G.; Giron, D. Leaf-Mining by Phyllonorycter Blancardella Reprograms the Host-Leaf Transcriptome to Modulate Phytohormones Associated with Nutrient Mobilization and Plant Defense. Journal of Insect Physiology 2016, 84, 114–127. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jinsphys.2015.06.003.