The ecological effects of herbivore-specific induced plant responses
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Feeding by herbivorous arthropods often induces phenotypic responses in their host plants. Such responses are increasingly found to be herbivore-specific, as both their strength and type can vary with herbivore identity. To date, most research has focused on discerning the causes, whether functional or evolutionary, of this specificity. However, recent studies have suggested that it can also have strong ecological effects on the distribution and occurrence of herbivores. Using Solanum dulcamara (bittersweet nightshade), I established a consistent ecological pattern within its herbivore community that is driven by specificity in plant responses: early-season differences in the identity of colonizing herbivores induce divergent plant phenotypes, producing heterogeneity in resource quality and a predictable distribution of late-season herbivores. These priority effects (i.e., differences in later herbivore occurrence caused by the identity of initial herbivores) seem to have their temporal basis in a physiological tradeoff within the plant, as it is unable to sequentially respond to different herbivore species. The responses associated with a particular herbivore occur only when it is the first species to feed on the plant. If its feeding follows that of a different herbivore, these responses are no longer induced. Chemical antagonism between different signaling pathways in the plant may underlie these results, in which case we may be able to predict the occurrence of priority effects based on knowledge of the response pathways induced by different herbivores. However, the spatial scale of these interactions can also influence their strength. I found that the presence of multiple plant phenotypes has a greater effect on herbivore occurrence within stands of S. dulcamara than it does between them. Fragmentation of S. dulcamara populations reduces the likelihood of herbivores moving between plants, thereby reducing the degree to which they can discriminate between different plant phenotypes. Overall, therefore, a combined knowledge of the chemical basis and ecological context of plant-herbivore interactions may be essential when examining the dynamics of herbivore communities.
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 machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| 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 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| 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 source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), 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".