While admiring the fall foliage on the crabapple tree, I noticed that some of the leaves still had patches of green, whereas others had turned a uniform yellow.
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| A crabapple leaf with three green patches. |
When I flipped these leaves over, I found a clue to why the patches were staying green. Wherever there was a green patch on the top of the leaf, there was a matching mine of a
tentiform leaf miner on the underside of the leaf.
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| Three tentiform leaf miner mines on the other side of the crabapple leaf. |
Below is a close-up of another mine. As the leaf miner feeds, it separates the layers of the leaf. The surface layer then dries and contracts, forming wrinkles on the bottom of the leaf and a tented shape on the top of the leaf.
It seems quite convenient for these leaf miners that the patches they are eating remain nutritious, even as the leaves are senescing everywhere else -- but how does this happen? Fascinatingly, a study has found that it is bacteria (living within the leaf miners) which are responsible for producing these "green islands" and that they do so by manipulating the plant's own hormone signalling.
Explore some more:
Plant green-island phenotype induced by leaf-miners is mediated by bacterial symbionts
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