Introduced Plants and Native Herbivores

Abstract

All photos by Florian Altermatt When a plant is introduced to a new region, can we anticipate which native herbivores will feed on it? In our article, we argue that often we can, so long as we know what other plants those herbivores eat. This begs the question as to how much information about native hosts we actually need to anticipate novel interactions. Working with a data set of moths and their native and introduced host plants, the study showed that the inclusion of an introduced plant in the diet of a moth could be predicted with an incomplete set of native host records. Caterpillars of the cinnabar moth (Tyria jacobaeae) feeding on ragwort (Senecio sp.). The discussion addresses how well (novel) trophic interactions can be predicted and how much this depends on the quality of the data set. Larva of the lackey moth (Malacosoma neustria) feed gregariously on a variety of different herbs. The speckled yellow (Pseudopanthera macularia) is a moth of the family Geometridae, whose larva feeds on a wide variety of vascular plants. The lunar thorn (Selenia lunularia) is a moth of the family Geometridae whose larvae feed on a variety of woody plants. The small emperor moth (Saturnia pavonia) is a moth of the family Saturniidae, whose larvae feed on a variety of woody and herbaceous plants. These photographs illustrate the article “Out-of-sample predictions from plant–insect food webs: robustness to missing and erroneous trophic interaction records,” by Ian Pearse and Florian Altermatt, published in Ecological Applications 25(7):1953–1961, October 2015. http://dx.doi.org/10.1890/14-1463.1