Abstract
To maintain relatively stable growth rates over gradients of resource quality, insect herbivores may adjust their consumption, or search for different quality forage. Using a total of six early-, mid-, and late-season species of sawflies consuming mountain birch foliage, we studied whether and how larval growth rate is buffered against low-quality foliage by plasticity in foraging behavior. We measured species-specific patterns in foraging behavior, the costs and benefits of behavioral plasticity, and postingestive physiological efficiencies along a leaf quality gradient. We conducted the experiments on 20 individual mountain birch trees, which were known from previous tests to vary in quality for herbivores. To our knowledge, this is the first study testing the relationship between compensatory consumption and dispersion of feeding bouts. In spite of species-specific variation in the level of postingestive efficiency, leaves from the same poor-quality trees were hard to process physiologically by all the...
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