Ian Baldwin is the head of the Department of Molecular Ecology at the Max Planck Institute for Chemical Ecology. For almost 20 years, he and his team have been studying the sophisticated defense strategies deployed by the coyote tobacco Nicotiana attenuata against its enemies in the plants' native habitat. At the Lytle Preserve in Utah, USA, his team had used the same field plot for experiments over the last 15 years. Eight years ago, they noticed the first sporadic cases of a plant disease that caused elongated tobacco plants to wilt suddenly. As the number of such cases increased over the years, more and more plants at earlier developmental stages contracted the infection.