Abstract
Plants and insects are constantly interacting in complex ways through forest communities since hundreds of millions of years. Those interactions are often related to variations in the climate. Climate change, due to human activities, may have disturbed these relationships in modern ecosystems. Fossil leaf assemblages are thus good opportunities to survey responses of plant–insect interactions to climate variations over the time. The goal of this study is to discuss the possible causes of the differences of plant–insect interactions’ patterns in European paleoforests from the Neogene–Quaternary transition. This was accomplished through three fossil leaf assemblages: Willershausen, Berga (both from the late Neogene of Germany) and Bernasso (from the early Quaternary of France). In Willershausen it has been measured that half of the leaves presented insect interactions, 35% of the fossil leaves were impacted by insects in Bernasso and only 25% in Berga. The largest proportion of these interactions in Bernasso were categorized as specialist (mainly due to galling) while in Willershausen and Berga those ones were significantly more generalist. Contrary to previous studies, this study did not support the hypothesis that the mean annual precipitation and temperature were the main factors that impacted the different plant–insect interactions’ patterns. However, for the first time, our results tend to support that the hydric seasonality and the mean temperature of the coolest months could be potential factors influencing fossil plant–insect interactions.
Highlights
Climate is a major factor affecting the extension, structure and composition of terrestrial ecosystems (Taylor et al, 2012; Frank et al, 2015)
Our results provide the first approach on plant–insect interactions from the Plio–Pleistocene in European paleoecosystems
Floristic richness and herbivory representativeness All genera and at least 22 plant species from Berga leaf assemblage are present in the Willershausen assemblage (Table S3)
Summary
Climate is a major factor affecting the extension, structure and composition of terrestrial ecosystems (Taylor et al, 2012; Frank et al, 2015). Studies on fossil insect herbivory have provided a variety of ecological and evolutionary information over long periods of time, such as climate (Wappler, 2010; Wappler et al, 2012), the evolutionary impact of plant radiations (Labandeira, 2012; Labandeira & Currano, 2013), food web dynamics (Wappler & Grımsson, 2016), extinction patterns (Labandeira, 2002; Labandeira, Johnson & Wilf, 2002; Donovan et al, 2016), and ecosystem recovery after extinction events (Wappler et al, 2009; Labandeira, Kustatscher & Wappler, 2016) They have shown that biodiversity loss may greatly impede trophic interactions and change the overall food web structure of ecological systems (Haddad et al, 2009). There is increasing concern about the loss of biological diversity from ecosystems (Hooper et al, 2012)
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