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Why Are There So Many Species of Herbivorous Insects in Tropical Rainforests?
Vojtech Novotny,1*Pavel Drozd,2Scott E. Miller,3Miroslav Kulfan,4Milan Janda,1Yves Basset,5George D. Weiblen6
Despite recent progress in understanding mechanisms of treespecies coexistence in tropical forests, a simple explanationfor the even more extensive diversity of insects feeding onthese plants has been missing. We compared folivorous insectsfrom temperate and tropical trees to test the hypothesis thatherbivore species coexistence in more diverse communities couldreflect narrow host specificity relative to less diverse communities.Temperate and tropical tree species of comparable phylogeneticdistribution supported similar numbers of folivorous insectspecies, 29.0 ± 2.2 and 23.5 ± 1.8 per 100 squaremeters of foliage, respectively. Host specificity did not differsignificantly between community samples, indicating that foodresources are not more finely partitioned among folivorous insectsin tropical than in temperate forests. These findings suggestthat the latitudinal gradient in insect species richness couldbe a direct function of plant diversity, which increased sevenfoldfrom our temperate to tropical study sites.
1 Institute of Entomology, Czech Academy of Sciences and Department of Zoology, University of South Bohemia, Branisovska 31, 370 05 Ceske Budejovice, Czech Republic. 2 Department of Biology, University of Ostrava, Chittussiho 10, 710 00 Ostrava, Czech Republic. 3 National Museum of Natural History and National Zoological Park, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC 20013–7012, USA. 4 Department of Zoology, Comenius University, Mlynska dolina B-1, 842 15 Bratislava, Slovakia. 5 Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute, Apartado 0843-03092, Balboa, Ancon, Panama. 6 Department of Plant Biology and Bell Museum of Natural History, University of Minnesota, 220 Biological Sciences Center, 1445 Gortner Avenue, St. Paul, MN 55108–1095, USA.
* To whom correspondence should be addressed. E-mail: novotny{at}entu.cas.cz
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