Experimental test of plant defence evolution in four species using long‐term rabbit exclosures
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Summary Plant defence traits have evolved over macro‐ and microevolutionary time‐scales in response to herbivores. Although a number of studies have investigated the evolutionary impacts of herbivores over short time‐scales, few studies have experimentally examined what defence traits most commonly evolve and whether multiple coexisting species exhibit similar evolutionary responses to herbivores. We addressed these questions using a long‐term experiment at Silwood Park, England, United Kingdom, where we excluded rabbits from 38 grassland plots for <1–34 years. To assess the evolutionary impacts of rabbits on plant defence traits, we collected seeds from plots containing the following perennial species: A nthoxanthum odoratum (Poaceae), F estuca rubra ssp. rubra (Poaceae), H olcus lanatus (Poaceae) and S tellaria graminea (Caryophyllaceae). We then grew these plants in a common garden and measured defensive and morphological traits. We found some evidence for evolutionary change of defence traits in three of the four species following the exclusion of rabbits. We observed the clearest changes in F. rubra , which showed a 9% decline in tolerance to herbivory and a 26% decline in leaf number. We also observed weak evidence for a change in all grass species towards a more erect growth form suggesting that grazing selects for plants that grow close to the ground. Although our results are most consistent with evolution due to changes in the frequency of alleles and genotypes, we cannot rule out that epigenetic changes (e.g. methylation) or maternal environmental effects also contributed to or caused the observed long‐term phenotypic responses. Synthesis . Our study provides an experimental test of the evolutionary effects of an ecologically important herbivore. We found evidence for plant defence evolution following >20 years of rabbit exclusion. However, the evidence was only strong in one species for multiple traits, weak in all three grass species for avoidance and absent in an herb species. This suggests that the evolutionary effects of an ecologically important herbivore on plants will be variable and difficult to predict in nature.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
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 itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".