"Chemical defenses in nearly all plants eradicate an endemic by any generalist insects. A result obtained by mathematical modeling"CHAKRABORTY, SUMANPlants with chemical defenses exist widely in nature. The phenomenon is backed by abundant data, available in plant chemical ecology. Sufficient data are also available to conclude that plant defenses act as deterrent and repellent to attacking herbivores, particularly deleterious generalist insects. Therefore, our objective is to inspect theoretically whether all plant species have to evolve chemical defenses to eradicate the generalists or not. The objective is addressed by developing deterministic ordinary differential equations under the assumptions: all plants are susceptible to oviposition by generalist insects and total plant population (in a region) is constant throughout the time span of insect attack. From our models, we explicitly obtain that generalists free stable state is possible if approximately all plant species are born with chemical defenses, otherwise not. Therefore, an endemic by generalists is impossible if nearly all plant species become chemically defended in nature. Authors: Suman Chakraborty, Shalu Dwivedi, and Stefan Schuster Institute: Matthias Schleiden Institute, Friedrich Schiller University Jena, Ernst-Abbe-Pl. 2, 07743 Jena, Germany |
« back