The power of smell: how understanding the language of insects can transform agriculture

Can you imagine an agriculture capable of communicating directly with insects to protect crops? What sounds like science fiction is an emerging reality thanks to chemical ecology, a discipline that studies how organisms use chemical signals to interact. In Chile, researcher Ricardo Ceballos from INIA Quilamapu is at the forefront of this new revolution, demonstrating that understanding the sophisticated sense of smell of insects is the key to a more sustainable agriculture. The sense of smell is one of the oldest and most complex sensory systems on the planet. In the struggle for survival, the first organisms developed an extraordinary ability to detect thousands of molecules in the environment, which allowed them to find food, avoid predators, and locate their mates. Although in humans this sense has been relegated to the background, in insects it has evolved to become a superpower. Their olfactory receptors, extremely sensitive, allow them to detect molecules in infinitesimal ...