Volatiles that Sound Bad: Sonification of Defensive Chemical Signals from Insects against Insects
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Boevé, Jean-Luc
Giot, Rudi
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Abstract
Defensive chemicals such as volatiles are essential for many insects
against the attack of predatory insects, but in the research
domain of chemical ecology there remains a need to better understand
how intrinsic physicochemical constants of volatiles determine
the intra- and interspecific diversification of such compounds
produced by prey insects, knowing that many predatory
insects primarily rely on chemical cues during foraging. To apprehend
and explore the diversity of emitted chemicals as related to
the receiver’s perception, here we aim to transform chemical into
acoustic signals by a process of sonification, because odours and
sounds are similarly perceived in their spatiotemporal dynamics.
Since insects often emit a complex mixture of repellents, we prototyped
a sonification software to process physicochemical parameters
of individual molecules, prior mixing these sonified data by
following the chemical profile of specific insect defensive secretions.
In a proof of concept, the repellence of insectivorous ants towards
single chemicals was compared with the repulsive response
of humans towards the auditorily translated signals. Expected outreaches
of our ongoing project called 'SonifChem' are, among others,
to explore the repulsive and even the attractive bioactivities of
chemicals emanating from any (biological) source.
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Date
2014-06
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