School of Biological Sciences, University of Reading, Reading, UK.
Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute, Balboa, Republic of Panama.
Ecol Lett. 2019 Oct;22(10):1638-1649. doi: 10.1111/ele.13359. Epub 2019 Jul 29.
The top-down and indirect effects of insects on plant communities depend on patterns of host use, which are often poorly documented, particularly in species-rich tropical forests. At Barro Colorado Island, Panama, we compiled the first food web quantifying trophic interactions between the majority of co-occurring woody plant species and their internally feeding insect seed predators. Our study is based on more than 200 000 fruits representing 478 plant species, associated with 369 insect species. Insect host-specificity was remarkably high: only 20% of seed predator species were associated with more than one plant species, while each tree species experienced seed predation from a median of two insect species. Phylogeny, but not plant traits, explained patterns of seed predator attack. These data suggest that seed predators are unlikely to mediate indirect interactions such as apparent competition between plant species, but are consistent with their proposed contribution to maintaining plant diversity via the Janzen-Connell mechanism.
昆虫对植物群落的自上而下和间接影响取决于宿主利用模式，而这些模式往往记录不佳，特别是在物种丰富的热带森林中。在巴拿马的巴罗科罗拉多岛，我们编制了第一个量化木质植物物种与其内部取食昆虫种子捕食者之间的营养相互作用的食物网。我们的研究基于超过 20 万颗代表 478 种植物的果实，与 369 种昆虫有关。昆虫对宿主的特异性非常高：只有 20%的种子捕食者与一种以上的植物物种有关，而每种树木物种都经历了两种昆虫物种的种子捕食。系统发育，而不是植物特性，解释了种子捕食者攻击的模式。这些数据表明，种子捕食者不太可能介导间接相互作用，如植物物种之间的明显竞争，但与它们通过詹森-康奈尔机制维持植物多样性的建议一致。
