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Why Alien Invaders Succeed: Support for the Escape‐from‐Enemy Hypothesis

2002· article· en· 499 citations· W2131839095 on OpenAlex· 10.1086/343872

Why is this work in the frame?

A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.

About CanadaIts subject is Canada, wherever its authors sit.

No Canadian affiliation. An affiliation-only frame — the usual design — would never have seen this work. It is one of the works that make the case for inverting the frame.

Machine scores (provisional)

Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.

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.

Opus teacher head0.070
GPT teacher head0.218
Teacher spread
0.148 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
Validation status
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

Abstract

Successful biological invaders often exhibit enhanced performance following introduction to a new region. The traditional explanation for this phenomenon is that natural enemies (e.g., competitors, pathogens, and predators) present in the native range are absent from the introduced range. The purpose of this study was to test the escape-from-enemy hypothesis using the perennial plant Silene latifolia as a model system. This European native was introduced to North America in the 1800s and subsequently spread to a large part of the continent. It is now considered a problematic weed of disturbed habitats and agricultural fields in the United States and Canada. Surveys of 86 populations in the United States and Europe revealed greater levels of attack by generalist enemies (aphids, snails, floral herbivores) in Europe compared with North America. Two specialists (seed predator, anther smut fungus) that had dramatic effects on plant fitness in Europe were either absent or in very low frequency in North America. Overall, plants were 17 times more likely to be damaged in Europe than in North America. Thus, S. latifolia's successful North American invasion can, at least in part, be explained by escape from specialist enemies and lower levels of damage following introduction.

Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.

The record

Venue
The American Naturalist
Topic
Plant and animal studies
Field
Agricultural and Biological Sciences
Canadian institutions
Funders
Keywords
BiologyAlienEcologyRange (aeronautics)Generalist and specialist speciesIntroduced speciesPredationHerbivoreInvasive speciesPredatorHabitatPerennial plantPopulationDemography
Has abstract in OpenAlex
yes