Large Differences in Herbivore Performance Emerge From Simple Herbivore Behaviours and Fine-Scale Spatial Heterogeneity in Phytochemistry.

ABSTRACT: Patterns of phytochemistry localisation in plant tissues are diverse within and across leaves. These spatial heterogeneities are important to the fitness of herbivores, but their effects on herbivore foraging and dietary experience remain elusive. We manipulated the spatial variance and clusteredness of a plant toxin in a synthetic diet landscape on which individual caterpillars fed. We monitored caterpillars with cameras across most of their larval development. Caterpillars that fed on diets with a lower spatial variance and more clustered arrangement of toxins had overall worse performance, mostly because those caterpillars ate less, moved more, ingested more toxin, or failed to physiologically acclimate. Using empirically parameterised individual-based models, we found that differences

SUBMITTER: Pan VS 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC11687352 | biostudies-literature | 2025 Jan

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature