Host specificity of herbivorous insects in tropical rainforests
Our studies in Papua New Guinea, which included sampling tens of thousands of herbivorous insects from their host plants, testing their feeding preferences in the laboratory and - in case of larvae - their rearing to adults, demonstrated that there are relatively few strictly specialised herbivores in tropical rainforests.
Our studies in Papua New Guinea, which included sampling tens of thousands of herbivorous insects from their host plants, testing their feeding preferences in the laboratory and - in case of larvae - their rearing to adults, demonstrated that there are relatively few strictly specialised herbivores in tropical rainforests. In particular, insects tend to feed on several closely related (congeneric) hosts, rather than being monophagous, i.e. limited to a single host plant species. This pattern of host preferences suggests that the extraordinarily speciose communities of tropical insects are not maintained by fine resource partitioning as has been often assumed.
