In this work a new bio-inspired metaheuristic based on the self-defense mechanism of plants is presented. This new optimization algorithm is applied to solve optimization problems, in this case optimization of mathematical functions for multiple variables, other works related to this, where the same algorithm is used with some modifications and improvements is presented in (Caraveo et al. in Advances in artificial intelligence and soft computing, Springer International Publishing, pp. 227–237, 2015 [3]). Since its inception the planet has gone through changes, so plants have had to adapt to these changes and adopt new techniques to defend from natural predators in this case. Many works have shown that plants have mechanisms of self-defense to protect themselves from predators. When the plants detect the presence of invading organisms this triggers a series of chemical reactions that are released to air and attract natural predators of the invading organism (Bennett and Wallsgrove in New Phytol, 127(4):617–633, 1994 [1]; Neyoy et al. Recent Advances on hybrid intelligent systems, Springer, Berlin, pp. 259–271, 2013 [10]; Ordeñana in Costa Rica, 63:22–32, 2002 [11]). For the development of this algorithm we consider as a main idea the predator prey model of Lotka and Volterra, where two populations are considered and the objective is to maintain a balance between the two populations.