Editorial: Insect physiological changes during insect-plant interaction

Abstract

The interactions between phytophagous insects and their host plants result from a long and continuous evolutionary process (Beran and Petschenka, 2022). Such ecological relationships led to an extraordinary diversity of insects and shaped their complex physiological systems (Wheat et al., 2007). The impacts of host plants on the physiology of herbivorous insects have increasingly become a paramount focus that should not be ignored. Chemical compounds’ composition of plants have not only significant variations in the inter/intra species aspect but also show spatiotemporal variations in different developmental stages and tissue types, or under changeable environments in nature, which lead to the resource assimilation and fitness challenges of insects (Delucia et al., 2012; Brütting et al., 2017). These close interations with plants affect the ecological plasticity of the performance of insect herbivores (Barker et al., 2019). Currently, in-depth exploration of the host plants’ effect on insects has become a research hotspot of insect physiology, however to test the highly complex hypothesis can be difficult. The current Research Topic aimed to highlight the recent developments on 1) how physiological changes occurred in herbivores during their interaction with host plants, 2) how these physiological changes in insects could be affected by other biotic factors.