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Ecology and the Environment pp 143–176Cite as

Evolutionary Ecology of Chemically Mediated Plant-Insect Interactions

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Part of the book series: The Plant Sciences ((PLANTSCI,volume 8))

Introduction

Plants and their associated insect herbivores account for more than half of all described species and interactions between these organisms are among the most dominant relationships in nature. Terrestrial plants serve as the primary food source for more than one million insect species scattered across diverse taxa, and these insect herbivores ingest >20 % of annual net primary productivity (Schoonhoven et al. 2005). Insects have developed diverse feeding strategies to obtain nutrients from their host plants, yet plants have not remained passive in the face of these attacks. Rather, plants have developed constitutive and dynamic forms of both physical and chemical resistance over evolutionary time to mitigate herbivory. These plant traits consequently influence the evolutionary trajectories of herbivores, thus resulting in the reciprocal evolution of herbivore countermeasures to thwart defenses. Ehrlich and Raven (1964) famously coined this phenomenon as “coevolution,” a...

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Biology, Indiana University, 59715, Bloomington, IN, USA

    Amy M. Trowbridge

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  1. Amy M. Trowbridge
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Correspondence to Amy M. Trowbridge .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. School of Natural Resources and the Environment and Laboratory for Tree Ring Research, University of Arizona, Tucson, Arizona, USA

    Russell K. Monson

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Trowbridge, A.M. (2014). Evolutionary Ecology of Chemically Mediated Plant-Insect Interactions. In: Monson, R. (eds) Ecology and the Environment. The Plant Sciences, vol 8. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-7501-9_11

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