Kairomone
noun ·Rare ·Advanced level
Definitions
- 1 Any substance produced by an individual of one species (often an insect) that benefits the recipient which is of a different species but is harmful to the producer.
"Among these substances, we propose to designate two major functional groupings by the terms allomone and kairomone, chosen as intentional parallels to the term pheromone."
Example
More examples"Among these substances, we propose to designate two major functional groupings by the terms allomone and kairomone, chosen as intentional parallels to the term pheromone."
Etymology
Blend of Ancient Greek καιρός (kairós, “advantage; profit”, noun) + English pheromone, coined in the 1970 article “Allomones and Kairomones: Transspecific Chemical Messengers” by the American geneticist William Lacy Brown, Jr. (1913–1991), the German-American ecologist and entomologist Thomas Eisner (1929–2011), and the American ecologist Robert Harding Whittaker (1920–1980) which was published in BioScience: see the quotation.
More for "kairomone"
Data sourced from Wiktionary, WordNet, CMU, and other open linguistic databases. Updated March 2026.