After decades of field work from dozens of sites around the world, and after two years analyzing data, Matt Forister, associate UNR professor, and an international team have reported on global patterns in the diets of insect herbivores.
Among findings, they report that most insect herbivores, such as caterpillars, find and feast on just one kind of plant in any one location, rather than taking the buffet approach and eating everything in sight.
“This is important to know as we pursue conservation, ecosystem management and restoration,” Forister said. “Our dietary specialization studies show us that a majority of insect herbivores, around the world, pick one plant in their local ecosystem and feed on just that one type of plant, not every plant that’s available, as many people assume.”
This is something that many scientists have known intuitively for a long time, but it has not before been quantified on this scale.
Forister and his colleagues and co-authors have published an article in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, which publishes research, science news and actions of the National Academy of Sciences. It documents diets from site-specific host records for more than 7,500 species of insect herbivores from several continents.
“This resolves a big debate in the scientific literature,” Forister said. “We need to know what insects eat when doing ecosystem restoration, and we shouldn’t assume that species with generalist feeding habits will necessarily fill the same ecological roles as more specialized species.”
For example, as restoration is completed along the Truckee River in Reno and Sparks, restoring and encouraging native plants that support specific insect herbivores will help keep the ecosystem and food chain stable and functioning into the future.
His collaboration with the European scientists doubled the amount of data Forister and his group had to work with. A large amount of data came from extensive studies conducted here in the Great Basin.
SOURCE: UNR.
