Are epicuticular waxes a surface defense comparable to trichomes? A test using two <i>Solanum</i> species and a specialist herbivore
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Although plants possess a suite of structural defenses, most studies have focused on trichomes. Trichomes can have both pre- and post-ingestive effects and have been consistently found to reduce herbivory. Along with trichomes, a few studies have focused on epicuticular waxes as an important defense; however, manipulated comparisons examining herbivore growth and development are limited. In this study, using two Solanum species ( Solanum glaucescens Zuccarini and Solanum macrocarpon Linnaeus) that vary in both defenses, we tested the hypothesis that variation in defenses will affect herbivore feeding, primarily by restricting feeding commencement. We used electron microscopy together with a series of plant- and diet-based manipulative experiments, using tobacco hornworm ( Manduca sexta Linnaeus; Lepidoptera: Sphingidae) as the herbivore. We found that Solanum glaucescens leaves had significantly fewer trichomes and significantly higher wax content when compared to Solanum macrocarpon. We also found that Solanum glaucescens waxes acted as a strong physical barrier resulting in lower mass gain and higher mortality of caterpillars compared to Solanum macrocarpon. Artificial diet manipulation experiments also suggested the possible toxicity of waxes. Collectively, we show that epicuticular waxes can play a significant role as a strong surface barrier and should be examined further.
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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 | 0.001 | 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) | 0.001 | 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".