Physical defenses and herbivory vary more within plants than among plants in the tropical understory shrub <i>Piper polytrichum</i>
Bibliographic record
Abstract
There is a growing appreciation that much of the trait variation within plant species is represented within individuals, for example, occurring among leaves within a plant. Subindividual variation is predicted to have key ecological consequences, but empirical understanding of how subindividual variation relates to species interactions, such as herbivory, is limited. We measured two physical defenses and herbivore damage on multiple leaves within individual plants of Piper polytrichum C.DC. (Piperaceae), a tropical understory shrub. We partitioned variance among- and within-plants and quantified patterns of trait and damage variation vis-à-vis leaf size and architectural position. We found that variance was considerably higher within plants than among plants for toughness (97%) and trichome density (57%), and that herbivore damage also varied most within plants (74%). Surprisingly, leaf position and size explained only small amounts of variance in traits (2.5%–16.5%) and herbivory (≤4%), indicating subindividual variability had low spatial predictability. The data suggest that individual P. polytrichum plants represent heterogeneous and spatially unpredictable landscapes of physical traits, and that interactions with herbivores are similarly variable. Our results are consistent with the hypothesis that subindividual variability defends plants against herbivores by increasing the difficulty of foraging for high-quality tissue.
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.
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".