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Plants are able to determine what types of herbivore species are present, and will react differently given the herbivore's traits. If certain defense mechanisms are not effective, plants may turn to attracting natural enemies of herbivore populations. For example, wild tobacco plants use nicotine, a neurotoxin, to defend against herbivores ...
Herbivory is of extreme ecological importance and prevalence among insects.Perhaps one third (or 500,000) of all described species are herbivores. [4] Herbivorous insects are by far the most important animal pollinators, and constitute significant prey items for predatory animals, as well as acting as major parasites and predators of plants; parasitic species often induce the formation of galls.
Viburnum lesquereuxii leaf with insect damage; Dakota Sandstone (Cretaceous) of Ellsworth County, Kansas. Scale bar is 10 mm. Knowledge of herbivory in geological time comes from three sources: fossilized plants, which may preserve evidence of defense (such as spines) or herbivory-related damage; the observation of plant debris in fossilised animal feces; and the structure of herbivore mouthparts.
Herbivore is the anglicized form of a modern Latin coinage, herbivora, cited in Charles Lyell's 1830 Principles of Geology. [3] Richard Owen employed the anglicized term in an 1854 work on fossil teeth and skeletons. [3] Herbivora is derived from Latin herba 'small plant, herb' [4] and vora, from vorare 'to eat, devour'. [5]
These differ in that constitutive defenses are present before an herbivore attacks, while induced defenses are activated only when attacks occur. [ 2 ] [ 3 ] [ 4 ] In addition to constitutive defenses, initiation of specific defense responses to herbivory is an important strategy for plant persistence and survival.
Herbivores can avoid plant defenses by eating plants selectively in space and time. For the winter moth, feeding on oak leaves early in the season maximized the amount of protein and nutrients available to the moth, while minimizing the amount of tannins produced by the tree. [16] Herbivores can also spatially avoid plant defenses.
These herbivores choose to use seaweed as clothing rather than food, meaning they value the seaweed more for their defensive abilities rather than as potential food. [62] In the field, invertebrates such as the Atlantic decorator crab ( Libinia dubia ) experience significantly less predation when "clothed" in noxious seaweed than their ...
DNA evidence supports this hypothesis, and the small modern hyraxes share numerous features with elephants, such as toenails, excellent hearing, sensitive pads on their feet, small tusks, good memory, higher brain functions compared with other similar mammals, and the shape of some of their bones.