Insights from excrement: invasive gastropods shift diet to consume the coffee leaf rust and its mycoparasite

Abstract

Agroecosystems are almost always by definition composed of novel assemblages of organisms from various parts of the world (Perfecto and Vandermeer 2015). As ecologists, we have little ability to predict a priori how interactions within these novel assemblages will organize themselves and what their impacts will be within and adjacent to agricultural production. While it may be possible to make coarse predictions about well-studied organisms, as with natural enemy release in non-native ranges, it is less often the case that we are able to predict the development of novel interactions which result from host shifts in new ecological contexts (Agosta 2006; Nylin et al. 2018).