Enemy release and biotic resistance are competing, but not mutually exclusive, hypotheses addressing the success or failure of non-native plants entering a new region. Enemy release predicts that exotic plants become invasive by escaping their co-adapted herbivores and by being unrecognized or unpalatable to native herbivores that have not been selected to consume them. In contrast, biotic resi...

Inducible plant resistance against herbivores is becoming a paradigm of plant–herbivore ecology. Fundamental to understanding induced resistance and its evolutionary ecology is specificity of ‘‘induction’’ and ‘‘effects’’. Specificity in the induction of resistance refers to whether plant damage by various herbivores causes the same response in plants. Specificity in the effects of induced resi...

Plant–plant interactions can be a complex mixture of positive and negative interactions, with the net outcome depending on abiotic and community contexts. In savanna systems, the effects of large herbivores on tree– grass interactions have rarely been studied experimentally, though these herbivores are major players in these systems. In African savannas, trees often become more abundant under h...

African rainforest harbors herbivores at high density. However, because plants and soils typically lack in some essential minerals, rainforest is not always a suitable habitat for herbivores. How they fulfill the mineral requirements is therefore an important question to animal ecology and conservation. Although large marshes, called 'bais', are often mentioned as efficient mineral-resource, li...

Coevolutionary models suggest that herbivores drive diversification and community composition in plants. For herbivores, many questions remain regarding how plant defenses shape host choice and community structure. We addressed these questions using the tree genus Inga and its lepidopteran herbivores in the Amazon. We constructed phylogenies for both plants and insects and quantified host assoc...

The objective of this paper is to study an optimal resource management problem for some classes of tritrophic systems composed by autotrophic resources (plants), bottom level consumers (herbivores) and top level consumers (humans). The first class of systems we discuss are linear chains, in which biomass flows from plants to herbivores, and from herbivores to humans. In the second class of syst...

Angiosperms diversification was primarily driven by pollinator agents, but non-pollinator agents also promoted floral evolution. Gentiana lutea shows pollinator driven flower color variation in NW Spain. We test whether insect herbivores and livestock, which frequently feed in G.lutea, play a role in G. lutea flower color variation, by answering the following questions: (i) Do insect herbivores...

1 Herbivores may negatively impact plant populations by reducing the survival, growth and reproduction of individual plants. 2 In African savannas, browsing by large mammalian herbivores has been shown repeatedly to reduce adult survival and growth of members of the genus Acacia , the dominant trees in these systems. However, the potential costs of mammalian herbivory to Acacia reproduction are...

Parker et al. (Reports, 10 March 2006, p. 1459) showed that native herbivores suppress exotic plants more than native plants. Further analysis reveals that the effect of native herbivores is reduced on exotic plant species that are closely related to native species in the invaded region. Exotic plants may share traits with native congeners that confer similar resistance to resident herbivores.

Herbivores that oviposit in flowers of animal-pollinated plants depend on pollinators for seed production and are therefore expected to choose flowers that attract pollinators. This provides a mechanism by which seed herbivores and pollinators could impose conflicting selection on floral traits. We measured phenotypic selection on floral traits of Lobelia siphilitica (Lobeliaceae) via female fi...