Do Plants Use Visual and Olfactory Carrion-Based Aposematism to Deter Herbivores?
Sticky plant surfaces made of trichomes were shown experimentally not only to defend plants directly by killing, damaging, or slowing down insects (sensu Levin 1973) but also to enhance indirect defense by attracting predaceous arthropods to such carrion-
- PDF / 80,820 Bytes
- 3 Pages / 439.37 x 666.14 pts Page_size
- 32 Downloads / 167 Views
Do Plants Use Visual and Olfactory CarrionBased Aposematism to Deter Herbivores?
Sticky plant surfaces made of trichomes were shown experimentally not only to defend plants directly by killing, damaging, or slowing down insects (sensu Levin 1973) but also to enhance indirect defense by attracting predaceous arthropods to such carrion-carrying plants because it provides these predators with food (Krimmel and Pearse 2013; LoPresti et al. 2015). Concerning a possible role of carrion odor in plant defense from herbivory, Lev-Yadun et al. (2009b) proposed on theoretical grounds that plants’ carrion or dung odors produced by flowers of certain species may simultaneously serve both the long-known attraction of pollinators and also act as an olfactory aposematism towards mammalian herbivores. The anti-herbivory (defensive) carrion odor hypothesis was supported by field data showing that cattle repeatedly refrained for many years from grazing in very productive paddocks used for the disposal of cattle carcasses (Lev-Yadun and Gutman 2013). There are two types of sticky plant surfaces. The first and better studied sticky plant surface is the one covered by sticky or hooked trichomes (Levin 1973; Krimmel and Pearse 2013). Although trichomes are usually a constitutive component of the epidermis in the many taxa and genotypes that produce them during normal ontogeny, additional trichomes may be induced in many plant species following damage (Agrawal 1999; Karban 2015), further indicating their defensive role. The second type of sticky plant surface is temporary, made of fresh latex or resins that cover areas close to wounds as a type of defense expressed only after wounding (Fahn 1979). Insects are trapped in latex and resins oozing after wounding (Konno 2011) and if the trapped insects are not covered altogether by the latex or resin, they “decorate” the plant surface as do those entrapped by trichomes.
© Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2016 S. Lev-Yadun, Defensive (anti-herbivory) Coloration in Land Plants, DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-42096-7_42
209
210
42
Do Plants Use Visual and Olfactory Carrion-Based Aposematism to Deter…
Predators Exploit Both Living and Dead Insects Stuck to Plant Surfaces The opportunistic exploitation by predators of both live and dead insects stuck to or entrapped by plant trichomes has been known for a long time (Sugiura and Yamazaki 2006; Romero et al. 2008; and citations therein), but was considered only recently as regularly enhancing an indirect defense against invertebrate herbivores for plants (Krimmel and Pearse 2013; LoPresti et al. 2015). Because sticky plants as the outcome of trichomes (Duke 1994) and resin/latex secretion (Konno 2011) amount together to about a third of the land plant species, for small arthropods, both herbivorous and predaceous, and for small predatory birds, reptiles and mammals, the fact that many plants are sticky is potentially of considerable ecological and evolutionary importance and their avoidance or attraction may commonly be critical for the h
Data Loading...
