ArticleNature communications2021
Exotic plants accumulate and share herbivores yet dominate communities via rapid growth.
Article in Nature communications, 2021. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 7 papers.
What it found
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The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
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Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
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Who cites it
7 citing papers in PubMed.
- When the novelty wears off: enemy spillover drives plant invasion success.The New phytologist · 2025Review
- Invasive plants decrease arbuscular mycorrhizal fungal diversity and promote generalist fungal partners.The New phytologist · 2025Article
- Rapid Shifts in Relative Abundance Obscure Temporal Diversity Changes in a Metacommunity.Ecology and evolution · 2025Article
- Artificial night-time lighting and herbivory interactively reduce the biomass production of invasive plants while enhancing that of native plants.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2025Article
- Herbivory can increase plant fitness via reduced interspecific competition-evidence from models and mesocosms.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2025Article
- Article
- Puke or poop? Comparison of regurgitate and faecal samples to infer alpine grasshopper (Ecology and evolution · 2023Article
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
5 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Herbivores may facilitate or impede exotic plant invasion, depending on their direct and indirect interactions with exotic plants relative to co-occurring natives. However, previous studies investigating direct effects have mostly used pairwise native-exotic comparisons with few enemies, reached conflicting conclusions, and largely overlooked indirect interactions such as apparent competition. Here, we ask whether native and exotic plants differ in their interactions with invertebrate herbivores. We manipulate and measure plant-herbivore and plant-soil biota interactions in 160 experimental mesocosm communities to test several invasion hypotheses. We find that compared with natives, exotic plants support higher herbivore diversity and biomass, and experience larger proportional biomass reductions from herbivory, regardless of whether specialist soil biota are present. Yet, exotics consistently dominate community biomass, likely due to their fast growth rates rather than strong potential to exert apparent competition on neighbors. We conclude that polyphagous invertebrate herbivores are unlikely to play significant direct or indirect roles in mediating plant invasions, especially for fast-growing exotic plants.
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Registered trials
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