Sometimes a plant will signal distress, and its neighbors won’t produce defensive compounds, or sometimes they just produce less. Karban believes this may be because individual plants may have different tolerances for risk—one metric of personality. Some, he says, might exhibit a personality akin to, say, natural-born scaredy-cats; they will signal wildly at the slightest disturbance. In that case, other plants in the same family will treat their scared kin like the boy who cried wolf and ignore them. They won’t produce compounds of their own.
