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Book ChapterDOI

Plant apparency and chemical defense

Paul Feeny
- 01 Jan 1976 - 
- Vol. 10, pp 1-40
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TLDR
A test of how far understanding of insect ecology has progressed will be the authors' ability to predict how patterns vary from one kind of community to another and how they will change when subjected to natural or human disturbance.
Abstract
A major objective of insect ecology is to explain observed patterns of interaction between plants and herbivorous insects. We would like to understand both how such patterns are maintained in ecological time and also how they have come about in evolutionary time. A test of how far such understanding has progressed will be our ability to predict how patterns vary from one kind of community to another and how they will change when subjected to natural or human disturbance.

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Citations
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Journal ArticleDOI

The Problem of Pattern and Scale in Ecology: The Robert H. MacArthur Award Lecture

TL;DR: The second volume in a series on terrestrial and marine comparisons focusing on the temporal complement of the earlier spatial analysis of patchiness and pattern was published by Levin et al..
Journal ArticleDOI

The dilemma of plants: To grow or defend.

TL;DR: A conceptual model of the evolution of plant defense is concluded, in which plant physioligical trade-offs interact with the abiotic environment, competition and herbivory.
Journal ArticleDOI

Resource Availability and Plant Antiherbivore Defense

TL;DR: Resource availability in the environment is proposed as the major determinant of both the amount and type of plant defense, and theories on the evolution of plant defenses are compared with other theories.
Journal ArticleDOI

Carbon/nutrient balance of boreal plants in relation to vertebrate herbivory

TL;DR: Fundamental differences between the response of woody plants and graminoids to vertebrate herbivory suggest that the dynamics of browsing systems and grazing systems are qualitatively different.
Journal ArticleDOI

Interactions Among Three Trophic Levels: Influence of Plants on Interactions Between Insect Herbivores and Natural Enemies

TL;DR: It is argued that theory on insect-plant interactions cannot progress realistically without consideration of the third trophic level, and plants have many effects, direct and indirect, positive and negative, not only on herbivore but also on the enemies of herbivores.
References
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Journal ArticleDOI

Herbivores and the Number of Tree Species in Tropical Forests

TL;DR: Any event that increases the efficiency of the predators at eating seeds and seedlings of a given tree species may lead to a reduction in population density of the adults of that species and/or to increased distance between new adults and their parents.
Journal ArticleDOI

Butterflies and plants: a study in coevolution

TL;DR: The relationship between butterflies and their food plants is investigated, the examination of patterns of interaction between two major groups of organisms with a close and evident ecological relationship, such as plants and herbivores.
Journal ArticleDOI

Organization of a Plant-Arthropod Association in Simple and Diverse Habitats: The Fauna of Collards (Brassica Oleracea)

TL;DR: The results suggest a new proposition, the resource concentration hypothesis, which states that herbivores are more likely to find and remain on hosts that are growing in dense or nearly pure stands; that the most specialized species frequently attain higher relative densities in simple environments; and that biomass tends to become concentrated in a few species, causing a decrease in the diversity of herbsivores in pure stands.
Journal ArticleDOI

Seasonal changes in oak leaf tannins and nutrients as a cause of spring feeding by winter moth caterpillars

TL;DR: The content of oak leaf tannins, which inhibit the growth of winter moth larvae, increases during the summer and may render leaves less suitable for insect growth by further reducing the availability of nitrogen and perhaps also by influencing leaf palatability.

Strategies in herbivory by mammals: the role of

TL;DR: Large herbivores must select food from a wide variety of plant parts, species, and strains, and should prefer to feed on foods that contain small amounts of secondary compounds, and their body size and searching strategies should be adapted to optimize the number of types of foods available.
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