The four phases of plant-arthropod associations in deep time

By C. Labandeira. Geologica Acta, 2006

226 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Vascular-plant hosts, their arthropod herbivores, and associated functional feeding groups are distributed spatiotemporally into four major herbivore expansions during the past 420 m.y. They are: (1) a Late Silurian to Late Devonian (60 m.y.) phase of myriapod and apterygote, hexapod (perhaps pterygote) herbivores on several clades of primitive vascular-plant hosts and a prototaxalean fungus; (2) a Late Mississippian to end-Permian (85 m.y.) phase of mites and apterygote and basal pterygote herbivores on pteridophyte and basal gymnospermous plant hosts; (3) a Middle Triassic to Recent (245 m.y.) phase of mites, orthopteroids (in the broadest sense) and hemipteroid and basal holometabolan herbivores on pteridophyte and gymnospermous plant hosts; and (4) a mid Early Cretaceous to Recent (115 m.y.) phase of modern-aspect orthopteroids and derived hemipteroid and holometabolous herbivores on angiospermous plant hosts. These host-plant and herbivore associations are mediated by seven functional feeding groups: a) external foliage feeding, b) piercing-and-sucking, c) boring (Phase 1 origins); d) galling, e) seed predation, f) nonfeeding oviposition (Phase 2 origins); and leaf mining (early Phase 3 origin). Within about 20 m.y. of each herbivore expansion, there is a biota that expresses the nearly full spectrum of later plant-arthropod associations. These four associational phases may be linked to the paleoclimatologic variables of greenhouse/icehouse cycles and atmospheric O2 and CO2 levels by uncertain causes, although some relationship probably is present. The 7 functional feeding groups persist through most of the sampled interval but harbor host-plants and arthropod herbivores that are spatiotemporally ephemeral. Poor understanding of associations in Phases 1 to 3 is attributed to disproportionate focus on the angiosperm and holometabolan insect associations of Phase 4.

Subfields: Ecology, Evolution, Behavior and Systematics, Insect Science, Plant Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/3ba4feb51b68bd502d66722cd25acc1e332f4851

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In Ecology, Evolution, Behavior and Systematics

1. E. Currano
2. M. Bamford
3. C. Looy
4. R. Gastaldo
5. J. Neveling
6. R. Prevec
7. Michael Benton
8. C. Labandeira

In Insect Science

1. E. Currano
2. C. Labandeira

In Plant Science

1. E. Currano
2. C. Labandeira

Citations in the corpus

• The Pollination of Mid Mesozoic Seed Plants and the Early History of Long-proboscid Insects1,2,3 (2010, background): “Late Paleozoic evidence for this feeding mechanism also includes dispersed coprolites with fragmented palynomorphs (Labandeira, 2006b) and some extinct lineages of Permian insects with adult prognathous mouthparts bearing asymmetric mandibles (Rasnitsyn, 1977) may have fed in this way (Schicha,…”
• Rainforest collapse triggered Carboniferous tetrapod diversification in Euramerica (2010, background): “…marked increase in the incidence of herbivory is also seen among arthropods in the Kasimovian-Gzhelian, and an additional factor governing this change may have been the rise to dominance by tree ferns, which were relatively cheaply constructed and therefore more digestible (Labandeira, 2006).”
• Portrait of a Gondwanan ecosystem: A new late Permian fossil locality from KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa (2009, background): “Specifically, it illustrates that exophytic leafresource use, a broad category of feeding in which plant tissues are consumed by herbivores positioned external to the leaf, was established overwhelmingly on pteridosperm leaves (Labandeira, 2006), in this case, glossopterids.”
• The origin of herbivory on land: Initial patterns of plant tissue consumption by arthropods (2007, background): “Although the Mississippian origins of seed-fern herbivory remain obscure, during the Pennsylvanian there was partitioning of tissue types by several insect functional feeding groups, albeit with minimal levels of plant damage (Labandeira, 2006).”
• The Fossil Record of Plant-Insect Dynamics (2013, background): “…egg hatches a larva, which is transformed into a pupa, from which the adult emerges plant-host and insect-herbivore diversity during the Late Triassic (Scott et al. 2004, Labandeira 2006a) and the expansion of the mid-Cenozoic grassland biome (Strömberg 2005) are noteworthy but are just beginning.”