This is scientific American 60 second science. I'm Cynthia Graber. Got a minute?

Plants just like animals get injured. For plants it's often because some herbivorous snacking on them.

And also like animals, plants usually seal those wounds up quickly

to avoid infection or the loss of important materials.

But scientists recently found a plant that does not seal up a wound.

Instead, a type of nitrate called Solanum-Dul-Komara does its version of bleeding,

releasing drops of an unusual liquid at the wound site.

Well, what we found is that the plant is actually damaged by herbivores, like most plants

are in nature, and in response to that it secretes sugar secretions from the wound edges where the herbivores have damaged the plant.

Tobias Lorsing is a graduate student at Frey University of Berlin and one of the study authors.

The researchers at first thought the flow could just be a passive bleeding where the plant lost some of the sugar solution

being transported internally.

But it might also be and that is what we finally could show that the plant is excreting this stuff on purpose.

So it's changing the chemical composition

and it also controls the amount of the cohesion

that it produces.

The sugary liquid is a kind of nectar.

But it's not the nectar found in flowers that attracts pollinators.

It's actually the type of nectar that's sometimes produced to attract insects that protect the plant from herbivores.

But that nectar is secret at a specific structure called a nectory.

Instead, this bleeding nectar is produced at a wound site, but it does indeed attract

helpers, in this case ants that then serve as sugar-paid mercenaries in the fight against beetle larvae.

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