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Foraging Under Incomplete Information
Matthijs Vos
其他書名
Parasitoid Behaviour and Community Dynamics
出版M. Vos, 2001
ISBN90580840949789058084095
URLhttp://books.google.com.hk/books?id=UgNNAAAAYAAJ&hl=&source=gbs_api
註釋Herbivores are hard to find victims for parasitoids, and parasitic wasps may use any reliable information from the environment to locate them. Plants play a key role in providing this information. Plants may emit volatile infochemicals, when they are damaged by herbivores. Such volatiles are attractive to parasitoids and may guide them to their hosts. However, this research shows that the reliability of plant infochemicals may be very low when a complex of herbivores feeds on the plant. This is important, as plants are mostly attacked by several herbivore species, both in agricultural and natural ecosystems. The presence of nonhost herbivores causes parasitoids to waste time on damaged plants without hosts. A model study shows that the interaction between this 'wasted time' effect and herbivore diversity stabilises communities of parasitoids and herbivores. However, above a certain diversity threshold parasitoids may waste too much time on nonhost herbivores. This may lead to the local extinction of several parasitoid species. Thus, diversity may promote both stability and extinctions, when plants provide unreliable information.