Fungal endophytes of <i>Festuca rubra</i> increase in frequency following long-term exclusion of rabbits
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Plant – fungal endophyte interactions are common in nature and they can shape the ecology of plants. Vertically transmitted endophytes are hypothesized to serve as mutualists, protecting plants from herbivores. If this hypothesis is true, then we expect endophytes to be most abundant in the presence of herbivores and least abundant in their absence, assuming endophytes incur a cost to their host. We tested this prediction by studying the effects of intense rabbit (Oryctolagus cuniculus Linnaeus) grazing on grass–endophyte interactions at Silwood Park, UK. We examined seeds of red fescue (Festuca rubra L.) collected from 15 natural populations that were protected from rabbits for 0.3–21 years. Contrary to our prediction, the mean proportion of seeds with endophytes increased 1.84×, from 0.45 to 0.83, following 21 years of rabbit exclusion. To better understand the mechanisms driving this increase in frequency, we conducted a fully factorial greenhouse experiment where we manipulated the presence or absence of endophyte infection, intraspecific competition, and simulated grazing on F. rubra plants. In both damaged and undamaged treatments, infected plants produced approximately twice as much biomass as uninfected plants, and endophytes did not influence tolerance to herbivory. These results suggest that endophytes directly change plant growth but not compensatory responses to damage. In the absence of competitors, infected plants produced 2.17× more biomass than uninfected plants, whereas in the presence of competitors, infected plants produced only 1.55× more biomass than uninfected plants. This difference suggests that intraspecific competition might lessen the benefits of endophyte infection. Our results do not support the defensive mutualism hypothesis, but instead suggest that endophyte-induced plant growth is important in shaping the costs and benefits of endophytes in our system.
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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".