Abstract
Sticky plant surfaces made of trichomes were shown experimentally not only to defend plants directly by killing, damaging, or slowing down insects (sensu Levin 1973) but also to enhance indirect defense by attracting predaceous arthropods to such carrion-carrying plants because it provides these predators with food (Krimmel and Pearse 2013; LoPresti et al. 2015). Concerning a possible role of carrion odor in plant defense from herbivory, Lev-Yadun et al. (2009b) proposed on theoretical grounds that plants’ carrion or dung odors produced by flowers of certain species may simultaneously serve both the long-known attraction of pollinators and also act as an olfactory aposematism towards mammalian herbivores. The anti-herbivory (defensive) carrion odor hypothesis was supported by field data showing that cattle repeatedly refrained for many years from grazing in very productive paddocks used for the disposal of cattle carcasses (Lev-Yadun and Gutman 2013).
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Lev-Yadun, S. (2016). Do Plants Use Visual and Olfactory Carrion-Based Aposematism to Deter Herbivores?. In: Defensive (anti-herbivory) Coloration in Land Plants. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-42096-7_42
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-42096-7_42
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