Insect leaf-chewing damage tracks herbivore richness in modern and ancient forests.

ABSTRACT: 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 chew

SUBMITTER: Carvalho MR 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC4008375 | biostudies-literature | 2014

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature