Low Nutritive Quality as a Defense Against Optimally Foraging Herbivores

摘要: Using a simple optimization model, we analyze whether low nutritive quality in terms of nutrient concentration can be profitable anti-herbivore strategy for individual plants. Contrary to most previous studies, ours has considered vertebrate herbivores feeding on discrete food items such as trees. The are regarded patches and exploited according the marginal-value theorem. Low-nutrient strategies (possibly associated with correspondingly high levels defense compounds) expected if browsing pressure is (i.e., encounter rate plants and/or long handling time set by large interplant distances) inherently fast-growing exposure potentially deleterious herbivory. Moreover, critical size escape from herbivory influences optimal solution. We predict that resource-poor habitats should tend maximize their therefore rely carbon-based defenses, further incre...