Date of this Version
6-17-2014
Document Type
Article
Abstract
Specialist herbivores are thought to often enhance or maintain plant diversity within ecosystems, because they prevent their host species from becoming competitively dominant. In contrast, specialist herbivores are not generally expected to have negative impacts on non-hosts. However, we describe a cascade of indirect interactions whereby a specialist sooty mold (Scorias spongiosa) colonizes the honeydew from a specialist beech aphid (Grylloprociphilus imbricator), ultimately decreasing the survival of seedlings beneath American beech trees (Fagus grandifolia). A common garden experiment indicated that this mortality resulted from moldy honeydew impairing leaf function rather than from chemical or microbial changes to the soil. In addition, aphids consistently and repeatedly colonized the same large beech trees, suggesting that seedling-depauperate islands may form beneath these trees. Thus this highly specialized three-way beech-aphid-fungus interaction has the potential to negatively impact local forest regeneration via a cascade of indirect effects.
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a
Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication 1.0 License.
Recommended Citation
Cook-Patton et al. (2014), Cascading effects of a highly specialized beech-aphid–fungus interaction on forest regeneration. PeerJ 2:e442; DOI 10.7717/peerj.442
Rights Statement
No Copyright - United States. URI: http://rightsstatements.org/vocab/NoC-US/1.0/
The organization that has made the Item available believes that the Item is in the Public Domain under the laws of the United States, but a determination was not made as to its copyright status under the copyright laws of other countries. The Item may not be in the Public Domain under the laws of other countries. Please refer to the organization that has made the Item available for more information.
Comments
Originally published in PeerJ.