Airborne communication between individuals, called "eavesdropping" in this paper, can cause plants to become more resistant to herbivores when a neighbor has been experimentally clipped. The ecological relevance of this result has been in question, since individuals may be too far apart for this interaction to affect many plants in natural populations. We investigated induced resistance to herb...

Bacteria and fungi that colonise plant surfaces and internal plant tissues (epiphytes and endophytes respectively) are ubiquitous, residing latently or actively colonising the plant locally as well as systemically. Endophytic microorganisms generally originate from the epiphytic communities of the root or aerial surfaces as well as from within seed material. Besides entering plants through natu...

Recent advances in allometric theory have proposed a novel quantitative framework by which to view the evolution of plant form and function. This general theory has placed strong emphasis on the importance of long-distance transport in shaping the evolution of many attributes of plant form and function. Specifically, it is hypothesized that with the evolutionary increase in plant size natural s...

Plant resistance and predation have strong independent and interacting eff ects on herbivore survival, behavior, and patterns of herbivory. Historically, research has emphasized variation in the consumption of herbivores by enemies. Recent work, however, demonstrates that predators also elicit important changes in the traits of their prey, but we do not know how this is infl uenced by plant qua...

Plants have two principal defense mechanisms to decrease fitness losses to herbivory: tolerance, the ability to compensate fitness after damage, and resistance, the ability to avoid damage. Variation in intensity of herbivory among populations should result in variation in plant defense levels if tolerance and resistance are associated with costs. Yet little is known about how levels of toleran...