Symposium # 23: Why Variation is Not Just Noise: The Influence of Variability on Plant-Herbivore and Plant-Pathogen Interactions.

Organized by: C. Orians.
Wednesday, August 9, 2000
1:00 PM to 5:00 PM
Ballroom II - Cliff Lodge

In 1983, the influential book Variable Plants and Herbivores in Natural and Managed Systems introduced a new conceptual focus to the field of plant-herbivore interactions. The chapters in this book identified many sources of variation in plant-herbivore systems and, more importantly, suggested that variability itself might have important ecological and evolutionary consequences. In the 17 years since this book was published, an impressive body of research has addressed variation in plant-herbivore systems, with a particular wealth of work on herbivore responses to host-plant quality, induced plant resistance, and herbivore responses to plant diversity. Despite this important work relating to variation, relatively few studies have directly confronted the consequences of variation per se. Given the new data now available and the increasing use of mathematical theory as a tool in plant-insect studies, we feel that the time is ripe to re-examine this issue. We are now in a position to both evaluate how far we have come, and to highlight how variability can be the focus of conceptually exciting work in plant-insect interactions in the next decade.

We propose a symposium to address how levels of within and among plant variability affect the ecology and evolution of plants and their herbivores and pathogens. Rather than cataloging sources of variation, we focus specifically on differences between systems with more or less variation. This symposium will highlight the impact of variability as an important new direction for research in plant-herbivore/pathogen interactions, and for ecology in general. We have chosen speakers who will address a broad range of topics in this area, representative of the variety of approaches currently used in plant-herbivore studies. The proposed talks will include ecological and evolutionary studies of both herbivores and pathogens, and applied and basic research using both theory and experiments.