kairomone.
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.
Meaning & usage
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.
Where this word comes from
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.
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Definitions, grammatical labels, IPA, etymology and examples: Wiktionary contributors, extracted by Kaikki / Wiktextract. Adapted under CC BY-SA 4.0. Selected fields and authored examples are shown; third-party quotations and audio are omitted. See contributor history.
Last enriched 2026-09-10. Definitions are in English. Romanizations are shown when supplied by the source; syllable estimates are omitted for unsupported scripts.