Resource Abundance and Insect Herbivore Diversity on Woody Fabaceous Desert Plants

By E. S. Marques, P. Price, N. Cobb. 2000

89 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Abstract This study addresses four hypotheses that may account for differences in the number of insect herbivore species among plant species. These hypotheses are based on the assumption that insect diversity is a function of the number, quantity, and distribution of plant resources used by herbivores. The study investigated predictions that herbivore species richness will increase as a function of increasing the following: (1) host plant distribution over the landscape (host plant geographical distribution hypothesis), (2) host plant density within a habitat (resource concentration hypothesis), (3) size of individual plants (plant size hypothesis), or (4) abundance of resources (resource abundance hypothesis). We tested predictions from these hypotheses by examining the species richness of insect herbivores on five sympatric species of fabaceous plants that varied in their local dispersion of individual plants and plant architecture. Among these five species, plant geographical distribution varied threefold, density varied 38-fold, plant size and food resources available to insect herbivores varied ≈100-fold. Plant geographical distribution, plant size, and the resource concentration hypotheses were not corroborated in this study. Resource abundance, measured as plant dry weight, accounted for the differences in number and abundance of insect species between host plant species. Leaf biomass accounted for 44.15% of the variation in number of insect herbivore species and 51.76% of the variation in abundance of insect herbivores using leaves as resources. Flower biomass accounted for 32.86% of the variation in the number of insect herbivore species using flowers. Therefore, plants that offered a greater quantity of resources, especially leaves and flowers, had greater species richness and abundance in insect herbivores.

Subfields: Ecology, Ecology, Evolution, Behavior and Systematics, Nature and Landscape Conservation

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/30b3e2fe0a4c350e4654430b8da53170174f50e1

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Ecology

1. S. Miller
2. I. Kaplan
3. V. Novotný
4. Timothy J. S. Whitfeld
5. G. Weiblen

In Ecology, Evolution, Behavior and Systematics

1. S. Miller
2. G. Weiblen
3. V. Novotný
4. Timothy J. S. Whitfeld
5. I. Kaplan
6. Pedro Barbosa
7. D. Janzen
8. Y. Basset

In Nature and Landscape Conservation

1. G. Weiblen
2. S. Miller
3. Timothy J. S. Whitfeld
4. I. Kaplan
5. Petr Klimes
6. V. Novotný
7. Jan Hrček
8. D. Janzen

Citations in the corpus

• Stand scale effects of partial harvesting and clearcutting on small mammals and forest structure (2004, unknown): “…short-tailed shrews are often associated with stands with dense herbaceous vegetation (Miller and Getz, 1977; Healy and Brooks, 1988; Kirkland, 1990), possibly because of the relationship between insect density and vegetation structure and diversity (Murdoch et al., 1972; Marques et al., 2000).”
• Associational Resistance and Associational Susceptibility: Having Right or Wrong Neighbors (2009, background): “D ow nl oa de d fr om a rj ou rn al s. an nu al re vi ew s. or g by M ic hi ga n St at e U ni ve rs ity L ib ra ry o n 09 /2 2/ 09 .”
• Predicting tropical insect herbivore abundance from host plant traits and phylogeny (2012, methodology): “We chose this approach over Mantel tests because the latter lacks power and is known to involve high Type I error with phylogenetic information, whereas Blomberg’s K does not (Harmon and Glor 2010).”