EVOLUTION OF RESISTANCE IN PLANTS TO HERBIVORES

Plant resistance traits are heritable traits that reduce the amount of damage suffered by the plant. At this time, our understanding of the actual process by which these resistance traits evolve in natural system is limited, despite the hypothesized importance of herbivores as agents of plant evolution. Recent studies suggest that the selection pressure imposed by insect herbivores is variable in time and space. In turn, evolutionary response to herbivore selection pressure, when it does occur, may be constrained by tradeoffs between resistance and growth in the absence of herbivores, negative genetic correlations among resistance traits, and plant genotype-herbivore species interactions.