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The adaptive value of young leaves being tightly folded or rolled on monocotyledons in tropical lowland rain forest: an hypothesis in two parts

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Abstract

In tropical lowland rain forest, we find that species with the leaves tightly folded or rolled until they reach at least 50% of final length occur in 10 of the 15 monocot families with >100 species, and in 12 of the 24 monocot families with <100 species, but in only seven of the 212 dicot families (eudicots and magnoliids). Earlier researchers have described how examples of tightly folded and rolled leaves develop, but most have not considered the potentially adaptive value of this pattern of growth. We hypothesize that it is a protection against herbivorous invertebrates. For tropical and temperate dicots, the young leaves have been found to suffer much smaller losses to herbivores while folded and rolled than after they are unfolded or unrolled. Being folded or rolled until a late stage involves an ‘opportunity cost’ in the loss of photosynthesis. Among dicots, defences involving such a cost (notably late development of photosynthetic systems in pendent soft young leaves) are typical of shade-tolerant species, which have longer-lived leaves than light-demanders. In contrast, among monocots late folding and rolling are found in both shade-tolerators and light-demanders. We hypothesize that late folding and rolling bring a net advantage to monocots in general, whether shade-tolerant or light-demanding, despite the opportunity cost, because they mostly have fewer leaves per plant of a given size, and therefore an individual leaf is relatively more valuable to the plant. As a coda, we suggest that the ‘sleep movements’ of some tropical plants, and the circinate vernation of ferns and some cycads, provide protection against invertebrate herbivores through the apposition of two or more layers of leaf.

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Acknowledgements

We thank Jennie Bee for the drawings in Fig. 1, Michael Lock for much help at Kew, Trevor Clifford, Peter Stevens, Jens-Christian Svenning, Ian Turner and Orlando Vargas for information about various plants and animals, William Foster, Julian Hibberd, Jennie Read, Lawren Sack and Mark Westoby for constructive criticism of earlier drafts, and three anonymous reviewers for their suggestions. The fieldwork by P.J.G. was made possible by a grant from the University of Cambridge, support from the Tropical Biology Association and a Mellon Fellowship.

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Correspondence to Peter J. Grubb.

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Table A1 Families of dicots found in tropical lowland rain forest

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Grubb, P.J., Jackson, R.V. The adaptive value of young leaves being tightly folded or rolled on monocotyledons in tropical lowland rain forest: an hypothesis in two parts. Plant Ecol 192, 317–327 (2007). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11258-007-9302-0

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