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Differences in meristems between monocots and dicots and susceptibility to attack by gall-inducing insects

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Abstract

We used comparative methods that account for the phylogenetic correlations among species to test hypotheses about the community of gall-inducing insects on dicotyledonous and monocotyledonous plants and woody and herbaceous angiosperms in the UK. We found that the species richness of gall-inducing insects on dicots was greater than on monocots and that the odds of a dicot having an associated gall-inducing insect is 42% higher than for a monocot. Woody angiosperms have higher species richness of associated gall-inducing insects than do herbaceous angiosperms. Furthermore, using a Monte Carlo analysis we found that attacks by gall-inducing insects on monocot families were phylogenetically clustered in the order Poales, particularly within the grass family Poaceae. We suggest that the higher risk of attack on dicots and higher species richness of gall-inducing insects on woody angiosperms, which are exclusively dicots, arises because of differences in the abundance or susceptibility of dicot meristems to attack by gall-inducing insects. Architectural and anatomical differences between monocots and dicots that give rise to differences in meristem abundance and anatomy appear to play an important role in determining the occurrence and richness of associated gall-inducing insects on host plants.

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Acknowledgements

We would like to acknowledge all of the organizations that made this data collection and analysis possible; a special thanks to the Botanical Society of Great Britain and Ireland and the British Plant Gall Society for access to their distribution records. For these we must also acknowledge and thank the 1000s of volunteer recorders that contributed to the various databases we utilized for their contribution. We also acknowledge the National Biodiversity Network and the Biological Records Centre for making these data easily accessible. We thank J. Silvia for providing a python program to read and extract geographic range information from the zip files downloaded from the National Biodiversity Network. We thank Emmanuel Paradis for assistance in understanding bugs in the GEE package in R. We would also like to thank W. Durka for providing us an updated version of the Daphne tree. We thank K. Simonin, G. Spicer, and three anonymous reviewers for helpful comments on an earlier draft of this manuscript.

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  1. Department of Biology, San Francisco State University, 1600 Holloway Avenue, San Francisco, CA, 94132, USA

    Megan S. Silvia & Edward F. Connor

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  1. Megan S. Silvia
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  2. Edward F. Connor
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Correspondence to Edward F. Connor.

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Handling Editor: John F. Tooker.

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Silvia, M.S., Connor, E.F. Differences in meristems between monocots and dicots and susceptibility to attack by gall-inducing insects. Arthropod-Plant Interactions 11, 485–494 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11829-017-9502-z

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