Jerusalem, 15 July, 2025 (TPS-IL) — In a world-first discovery, Israeli scientists documented scientific evidence of acoustic interaction between plants and animals, Tel Aviv University announced on Tuesday. The study revealed that female moths use sound to decide where to lay their eggs by listening for distress signals emitted by plants in ultrasonic frequencies beyond human hearing.
The groundbreaking research was led by Dr. Rya Seltzer and Guy Zer Eshel, students in the laboratories of Prof. Yossi Yovel from the School of Zoology and Prof. Lilach Hadany from the School of Plant Sciences and Food Security at TAU’s Wise Faculty of Life Sciences. The study was carried out in collaboration with the Plant Protection Institute at the Volcani Institute. The Volcani Institute is the Ministry of Agriculture’s research arm.
The findings were published in the peer-reviewed eLife journal.
This discovery builds on a previous 2023 study by the same research team, which found that stressed plants emit high-frequency sounds through a process associated with cavitation — the formation and collapse of air bubbles in the xylem, the plant’s water-conducting tissue.
When a plant is under stress, such as from dehydration or physical damage, the water tension inside the xylem becomes unstable. Tiny air bubbles can form and rapidly collapse, producing vibrations that generate ultrasonic sound waves. These sounds are typically in the range of 20 to 100 kilohertz — well above the range of human hearing but within the hearing range of many insects and some animals like bats and rodents.
“That discovery opened the door to extensive research on acoustic communication between plants and animals,” the scientists said.
“After proving in the previous study that plants produce sounds, we hypothesized that animals capable of hearing these high-frequency sounds may respond to them and make decisions accordingly,” explained Yovel. “Specifically, we know that many insects, which have diverse interactions with the plant world, can perceive plant sounds. We wanted to investigate whether such insects actually detect and respond to these sounds.”
To investigate, the team focused on female moths — chosen because they must select suitable plants on which to lay their eggs. A poor choice could mean starvation for their future offspring.
“We assumed the females seek an optimal site to lay their eggs — a healthy plant that can properly nourish the larvae,” Hadany explained. “Thus, when the plant signals that it is dehydrated and under stress, would the moths heed the warning and avoid laying eggs on it?”
In one experiment, researchers created a controlled environment using two boxes: one silent, and one with a speaker playing ultrasonic recordings of dehydrated tomato plants. The moths showed a strong preference for the noisy box, suggesting they interpreted the sound as evidence of a nearby plant.
But when researchers neutralized the moths’ hearing, the preference vanished. The moths chose randomly, showing that their earlier behavior was indeed based on auditory cues. “This was clear evidence that the preference was specifically based on listening to sounds, and not on other stimuli,” the team noted.
In a follow-up test, both options contained healthy tomato plants. One was accompanied by distress sounds, while the other remained silent. This time, the moths preferred the silent plant, avoiding the one giving off signals of stress.
To further probe what the moths were reacting to, the scientists repeated the box experiment, but replaced the plant sounds with those made by male moths, who emit similar ultrasonic frequencies. In this case, the females laid their eggs equally in both boxes, leading the researchers to conclude that the decision-making was triggered specifically by plant-emitted sounds.
The discovery opens doors to sound-based targeted irrigation, pest and disease management, and robotics and bio-inspired sensors that provide non-invasive monitoring at scale.
“We are convinced, however, that this is just the beginning,” the scientists said. “Acoustic interaction between plants and animals doubtlessly has many more forms and a wide range of roles. This is a vast, unexplored field — an entire world waiting to be discovered.”
