ArticleProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America2014
Herbivore diet breadth mediates the cascading effects of carnivores in food webs.
Article in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2014. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 23 papers.
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Who cites it
23 citing papers in PubMed.
- Herbivore Immunity Exhibits a Biphasic Relationship with Plant Defense Toxin Concentrations.Journal of chemical ecology · 2026Article
- Climate and regional plant richness drive diet specialization in butterfly caterpillars.Nature communications · 2026Article
- Pollen specialist bee species are accurately predicted from visitation, occurrence and phylogenetic data.Oecologia · 2024Article
- The fecal shield is a double-edged sword for larvae of a leaf beetle.Current zoology · 2023Article
- Plant-moth community relationships at the degraded urban peat-bog in Central Europe.Ecology and evolution · 2023Article
- Bats reduce insect density and defoliation in temperate forests: An exclusion experiment.Ecology · 2023Article
- Macroevolution of protective coloration across caterpillars reflects relationships with host plants.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2023Article
- A comparison of fecal sampling and direct feeding observations for quantifying the diet of a frugivorous primate.Current zoology · 2020Article
- Tri-trophic interactions: bridging species, communities and ecosystems.Ecology letters · 2019Review
- Dietary specialization is conditionally associated with increased ant predation risk in a temperate forest caterpillar community.Ecology and evolution · 2019Article
- Tree diversity drives associational resistance to herbivory at both forest edge and interior.Ecology and evolution · 2019Article
- No Indication of High Host-Plant Specificity in Afrotropical Geometrid Moths.Journal of insect science (Online) · 2019Article
- Anthropogenic fragmentation of landscapes: mechanisms for eroding the specificity of plant-herbivore interactions.Oecologia · 2018Review
- A spatial theory for emergent multiple predator-prey interactions in food webs.Ecology and evolution · 2017Article
- Bottom-up and top-down effects of tree species diversity on leaf insect herbivory.Ecology and evolution · 2017Article
- HPLC-MS Analysis of Lichen-Derived Metabolites in the Life Stages of Crambidia cephalica (Grote & Robinson).Journal of chemical ecology · 2017Article
- Predator and prey functional traits: understanding the adaptive machinery driving predator-prey interactions.F1000Research · 2017Review
- A genomic perspective on the generation and maintenance of genetic diversity in herbivorous insects.Annual review of ecology, evolution, and systematics · 2016Article
- Herbivore Diet Breadth and Host Plant Defense Mediate the Tri-Trophic Effects of Plant Toxins on Multiple Coccinellid Predators.PloS one · 2016Article
- Costs and benefits of plant allelochemicals in herbivore diet in a multi enemy world.Oecologia · 2015Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
6 authors.
Funding
Abstract
Predicting the impact of carnivores on plants has challenged community and food web ecologists for decades. At the same time, the role of predators in the evolution of herbivore dietary specialization has been an unresolved issue in evolutionary ecology. Here, we integrate these perspectives by testing the role of herbivore diet breadth as a predictor of top-down effects of avian predators on herbivores and plants in a forest food web. Using experimental bird exclosures to study a complex community of trees, caterpillars, and birds, we found a robust positive association between caterpillar diet breadth (phylodiversity of host plants used) and the strength of bird predation across 41 caterpillar and eight tree species. Dietary specialization was associated with increased enemy-free space for both camouflaged (n = 33) and warningly signaled (n = 8) caterpillar species. Furthermore, dietary specialization was associated with increased crypsis (camouflaged species only) and more stereotyped resting poses (camouflaged and warningly signaled species), but was unrelated to caterpillar body size. These dynamics in turn cascaded down to plants: a metaanalysis (n = 15 tree species) showed the beneficial effect of birds on trees (i.e., reduced leaf damage) decreased with the proportion of dietary specialist taxa composing a tree species' herbivore fauna. We conclude that herbivore diet breadth is a key functional trait underlying the trophic effects of carnivores on both herbivores and plants.
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