Background: Plants respond to herbivore damage with the release of volatile organic compounds (VOCs). This indirect defense can cause ecological costs when herbivores themselves use VOCs as cues to localize...

Plant associations with root microbes represent some of the most important symbioses on earth. While often critically promoting plant fitness, nitrogen-fixing rhizobia and arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi (AMF)...

The measurement of fitness is critical to biological research. Although the determination of fitness for some organisms may be relatively straightforward under controlled conditions, it is often a difficult or...

Plants produce a bewildering diversity of defensive compounds against their herbivore attackers. In addition to permanently expressed (constitutive) chemical defenses, plants generally show an array of...

Protective ant-plant mutualisms that are exploited by non-defending parasitic ants represent prominent model systems for ecology and evolutionary biology. The mutualist Pseudomyrmex ferrugineus is an obligate...

Background: Plant defense traits require resources and energy that plants may otherwise use for growth and reproduction. In order to most efficiently protect plant tissues from herbivory, one widely accepted...

Feeding strategies of specialist herbivores often originate from the coevolutionary arms race of plant defenses and counter-adaptations of herbivores. The interaction between bamboo lemurs and cyanogenic...

Plants producing toxic plant secondary metabolites (PSMs) deter folivores from feeding on them. Animals that can cope with noxious PSMs have a niche with a competitive advantage over other species. However, the...

Carbon allocation demands from root-nodulating nitrogen-fixing bacteria (NFB) can modulate the host plant's chemical phenotype, with strong bottom-up effects on herbivores. In contrast to well-studied rhizobia,...