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Insect Leaf-Chewing Damage Tracks Herbivore Richness in Modern and Ancient Forests

The fossil record demonstrates that past climate changes and extinctions significantly affected the diversity of insect leaf-feeding damage, implying that the richness of damage types reflects that of the unsampled damage makers, and that the two are correlated through time. However, this relationsh...

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Autores principales: Carvalho, Mónica R., Wilf, Peter, Barrios, Héctor, Windsor, Donald M., Currano, Ellen D., Labandeira, Conrad C., Jaramillo, Carlos A.
Formato: Online Artículo Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: Public Library of Science 2014
Materias:
Acceso en línea:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4008375/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/24788720
http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0094950
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author Carvalho, Mónica R.
Wilf, Peter
Barrios, Héctor
Windsor, Donald M.
Currano, Ellen D.
Labandeira, Conrad C.
Jaramillo, Carlos A.
author_facet Carvalho, Mónica R.
Wilf, Peter
Barrios, Héctor
Windsor, Donald M.
Currano, Ellen D.
Labandeira, Conrad C.
Jaramillo, Carlos A.
author_sort Carvalho, Mónica R.
collection PubMed
description The fossil record demonstrates that past climate changes and extinctions significantly affected the diversity of insect leaf-feeding damage, implying that the richness of damage types reflects that of the unsampled damage makers, and that the two are correlated through time. However, this relationship has not been quantified for living leaf-chewing insects, whose richness and mouthpart convergence have obscured their value for understanding past and present herbivore diversity. We hypothesized that the correlation of leaf-chewing damage types (DTs) and damage maker richness is directly observable in living forests. Using canopy access cranes at two lowland tropical rainforest sites in Panamá to survey 24 host-plant species, we found significant correlations between the numbers of leaf chewing insect species collected and the numbers of DTs observed to be made by the same species in feeding experiments, strongly supporting our hypothesis. Damage type richness was largely driven by insect species that make multiple DTs. Also, the rank-order abundances of DTs recorded at the Panamá sites and across a set of latest Cretaceous to middle Eocene fossil floras were highly correlated, indicating remarkable consistency of feeding-mode distributions through time. Most fossil and modern host-plant pairs displayed high similarity indices for their leaf-chewing DTs, but informative differences and trends in fossil damage composition became apparent when endophytic damage was included. Our results greatly expand the potential of insect-mediated leaf damage for interpreting insect herbivore richness and compositional heterogeneity from fossil floras and, equally promisingly, in living forests.
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spelling pubmed-40083752014-05-09 Insect Leaf-Chewing Damage Tracks Herbivore Richness in Modern and Ancient Forests Carvalho, Mónica R. Wilf, Peter Barrios, Héctor Windsor, Donald M. Currano, Ellen D. Labandeira, Conrad C. Jaramillo, Carlos A. PLoS One Research Article The fossil record demonstrates that past climate changes and extinctions significantly affected the diversity of insect leaf-feeding damage, implying that the richness of damage types reflects that of the unsampled damage makers, and that the two are correlated through time. However, this relationship has not been quantified for living leaf-chewing insects, whose richness and mouthpart convergence have obscured their value for understanding past and present herbivore diversity. We hypothesized that the correlation of leaf-chewing damage types (DTs) and damage maker richness is directly observable in living forests. Using canopy access cranes at two lowland tropical rainforest sites in Panamá to survey 24 host-plant species, we found significant correlations between the numbers of leaf chewing insect species collected and the numbers of DTs observed to be made by the same species in feeding experiments, strongly supporting our hypothesis. Damage type richness was largely driven by insect species that make multiple DTs. Also, the rank-order abundances of DTs recorded at the Panamá sites and across a set of latest Cretaceous to middle Eocene fossil floras were highly correlated, indicating remarkable consistency of feeding-mode distributions through time. Most fossil and modern host-plant pairs displayed high similarity indices for their leaf-chewing DTs, but informative differences and trends in fossil damage composition became apparent when endophytic damage was included. Our results greatly expand the potential of insect-mediated leaf damage for interpreting insect herbivore richness and compositional heterogeneity from fossil floras and, equally promisingly, in living forests. Public Library of Science 2014-05-02 /pmc/articles/PMC4008375/ /pubmed/24788720 http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0094950 Text en © 2014 Carvalho et al http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are properly credited.
spellingShingle Research Article
Carvalho, Mónica R.
Wilf, Peter
Barrios, Héctor
Windsor, Donald M.
Currano, Ellen D.
Labandeira, Conrad C.
Jaramillo, Carlos A.
Insect Leaf-Chewing Damage Tracks Herbivore Richness in Modern and Ancient Forests
title Insect Leaf-Chewing Damage Tracks Herbivore Richness in Modern and Ancient Forests
title_full Insect Leaf-Chewing Damage Tracks Herbivore Richness in Modern and Ancient Forests
title_fullStr Insect Leaf-Chewing Damage Tracks Herbivore Richness in Modern and Ancient Forests
title_full_unstemmed Insect Leaf-Chewing Damage Tracks Herbivore Richness in Modern and Ancient Forests
title_short Insect Leaf-Chewing Damage Tracks Herbivore Richness in Modern and Ancient Forests
title_sort insect leaf-chewing damage tracks herbivore richness in modern and ancient forests
topic Research Article
url https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4008375/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/24788720
http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0094950
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