Study suggests virus impacts caterpillar's phototactic response causing them to climb

(Phys.org) —A small team of researchers with Wageningen University in The Netherlands has found evidence that suggests that a type of virus that causes a species of caterpillar to climb higher up a plant, does so by causing a change to the victim's phototactic response. In their paper published in the journal Biology Letters, the team describes how they studied baculovirus infections in caterpillars and the experiments they conducted in attempting to show that changes in behavior attributed to the viral infection were likely due to changes in how light was perceived.

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