Latitudinal gradients in herbivory on<i>Oenothera biennis</i>vary according to herbivore guild and specialization
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Bibliographic record
Abstract
The latitudinal herbivory‐defense hypothesis (LHDH) posits that herbivory and plant defenses increase toward lower latitudes. Recent studies provide contradictory evidence and suggest alternative explanations for biogeographic patterns in plant–herbivore interactions. Here we test the LHDH by sampling herbivory from multiple generalist and specialist insect herbivores over the entire latitudinal native range of the plant species Oenothera biennis L . (Onagraceae). We sampled 79 populations on a 16° north‐south gradient from Ontario and Maine to Alabama and Florida. From each population, we quantified herbivory across feeding guilds by considering leaf herbivory caused by generalist insects, damage by a specialist stem‐boring beetle, and flower/seed herbivory by three Lepidoptera that specialize on Oenothera . We also related environmental and population density variables to herbivory. Our results show that latitudinal patterns vary dramatically among herbivore species. While generalist leaf herbivory showed no latitudinal pattern, stem borer damage increased with decreasing latitude. By contrast, the specialist flower/seed herbivores all caused less damage at lower latitudes. Temperature explained slightly more variation in herbivory than latitude, while precipitation and population density were less important. Overall, we show that every pattern of herbivory (positive, negative and no relationship) is possible across a latitudinal gradient, and this variation depends on the insects' degree of specialization and feeding guild.
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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it