He knew that certain orchids only attracted certain species of wasps, so the chemistry must be rather specific. He figured they had to be using some combination of the more than 1,700 floral scent compounds already known. “We could not have been more wrong,” Peakall said, in a keynote to the global community of botanists at the discipline’s annual conference in 2020. Almost all the semiochemicals he and his team analyzed were entirely new to plant science. And these were just a handful of orchids. How many more compounds were out there, at work in the air, manipulating the environment in
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