Agrawal, A

Agrawal, A. A., Janssen, A., Bruin, J., Posthumus, M.A., Sabelis, W. M. 2002. An ecological cost of plant defense: attractiveness of bitter cucumber plants to natural enemies of herbivores. Ecology Letters 5: 377-385. The authors examine this tritrophic system from the bottom-up perspective by comparing the direct plant defense of producing the bitter compound, cucurbitacin, which repels the herbivorous spider mites, to the indirect plant defense of producing volatile compounds to attract predator mites using a greenhouse release-recapture experiment.