Indirect effects of a top predator on a rain forest understory plant community

Ecology

Volumn 85, Issue 8, 2004, Pages 2144-2152

  Letourneau, D K ^a   Dyer, L A ^b   Vega, G C ^c  

^a UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA   (United States)

^b Tulane University   (United States)

^c Organization for Tropical Studies   (Costa Rica)

Author keywords

Ant plant; Biodiversity; Bottom up forces; Consumer vs. resource control; Costa Rica; Pheidole; Piper; Soil nutrients; Trophic cascade; Tropical rain forest

Indexed keywords

PERTURBATION; PLANT COMMUNITY; RAINFOREST; TROPHIC CASCADE;

CENTRAL AMERICA; COSTA RICA; WESTERN HEMISPHERE; WORLD;

COLEOPTERA; FORMICIDAE; PHEIDOLE; PIPER CENOCLADUM; PIPERACEAE;

EID: 8144222775     PISSN: 00129658     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1890/03-0525     Document Type: Article

References (47)

1. Bell, T., W. E. Neill, and D. Schuter. 2003. The effect of temporal scale on the outcome of trophic cascades experiments. Oecologia 134:578-586.
2. Brett, M. T., and C. R. Goldman. 1996. A meta-analysis of the freshwater trophic cascade. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (USA) 93:7723-7726.
3. Burger, W. 1971. Flora Costaricensis. Fieldiana Botany 35: 1-227.
4. Coley, P. D., J. P. Bryant, and F. S. Chapin, III. 1985. Resource availability and plant antiherbivore defense. Science 230:895-899.
5. Deal, R. T. 1997. Understory plant diversity in riparian alder-conifer stands after logging in southeast Alaska. USDA Forest Service, Pacific Northwest Research Station Research Note PNW-RN-523.
6. Dial, R., and J. Roughgarden. 1995. Experimental removal of insectivores from rain forest canopy: direct and indirect effects. Ecology 76:1821-1834.
7. Dyer, L. A., and D. K. Letourneau. 1999a. Relative strengths of top-down and bottom-up forces in a tropical forest community. Oecologia 119:265-274.
8. Dyer, L. A., and D. K. Letourneau. 1999b. Trophic cascades in a complex terrestrial community. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (USA) 96:5072-5076.
9. Dyer, L. A., and D. K. Letourneau. 2003. Top-down and bottom-up diversity cascades in detrital vs. living food webs. Ecology Letters 6:60-68.
10. Fretwell, S. D. 1977. The regulation of plant communities by food chains exploiting them. Perspectives in Biology and Medicine 20:169-185.
11. Hairston, N. G., F. E. Smith, and L. B. Slobodkin. 1960. Community structure, population control, and competition. American Naturalist 94:421-424.
12. Halaj, J., and D. H. Wise. 2001. Terrestrial trophic cascades: how much do they trickle? American Naturalist 157:262-281.
13. Hartshorn, G. S., and B. E. Hammel. 1994. Vegetation types and floristic patterns. Pages 73-89 in L. A. McDade, K. S. Bawa, H. A. Hespenheide, and G. S. Hartshorn, editors. La Selva. Ecology and natural history of a Neotropical rain forest. University of Chicago Press, Chicago, Illinois, USA.
14. Hunter, M. D., and P. W. Price. 1992. Playing chutes and ladders: heterogeneity and the relative roles of bottom-up and top-down forces in natural communities. Ecology 73: 724-732.
15. Janzen, D. H., editor. 1983. Costa Rican natural history. University of Chicago Press, Chicago, Illinois, USA.
16. Kneitel, J. M., and T. E. Miller. 2002. Resource and top-predator regulation in the pitcher plant (Sarracenia purpurea) inquiline community. Ecology 83:680-688.
17. Letourneau, D. K. 1983. Passive aggression: an alternative hypothesis for the Piper-Pheidole association. Oecologia 60:122-126.
18. Letourneau, D. K. 1990. Code of ant-plant mutualism broken by parasite. Science 248:215-217.
19. Letourneau, D. K. 1998. Ants, stem-borers, and fungal pathogens: experimental tests of a fitness advantage in Piper ant-plants. Ecology 79:593-603.
20. Letourneau, D. K., and L. A. Dyer. 1998. Experimental test in lowland tropical forest shows top-down effects through four trophic levels. Ecology 79:1678-1687.
21. Marquis, R. J. 1991. Herbivore fauna of Piper (Piperaceae) in a Costa Rican wet forest: diversity, specificity, and impact. Pages 179-208 in P. W. Price, T. M. Lewinsohn, G. W. Fernandes, and W. W. Benson, editors. Plant-animal interactions: evolutionary ecology in tropical and temperate regions. John Wiley and Sons, New York, New York, USA.
22. McCann, K. S. 2000. The diversity-stability debate. Nature 405:228-233.
23. McDade, L. A., K. S. Bawa, H. A. Hespenheide, and G. S. Hartshorn, editors. 1994. La Selva. Ecology and natural history of a Neotropical rain forest. University of Chicago Press, Chicago, Illinois, USA.
24. Montgomery, R. A., and R. L. Chazdon. 2002. Light gradient partitioning by tropical tree seedlings in the absence of canopy gaps. Oecologia 131:165-174.
25. Paine, R. T. 1966. Food web complexity and species diversity. American Naturalist 100:65-75.
26. Paine, R. T. 1995. A conversation on refining the concept of keystone species. Conservation Biology 9:962-964.
27. Polis, G. A., A. L. W. Sears, G. R. Huxel, D. R. Strong, and J. Maron. 2000. When is a trophic cascade a trophic cascade? Trends in Ecology and Evolution 15:473-475.
28. Polis, G. A., and D. R. Strong. 1996. Food web complexity and community dynamics. American Naturalist 147:813-846.
29. Polis, G. A., and K. O. Winemiller, editors. 1996. Food webs: integration of patterns and dynamics. Chapman and Hall, New York, New York, USA.
30. Power, M. E. 1992. Top-down and bottom-up forces in food webs: do plants have primacy? Ecology 73:733-746.
31. Preisser, E. L. 2003. Field evidence for a rapidly cascading underground food web. Ecology 84:869-874.
32. Price, P. W. 1991. The plant vigor hypothesis and herbivore attack. Oikos 62:244-251.
33. Risch, S., M. McClure, J. Vandermeer, and S. Waltz. 1977. Mutualism between three species of tropical Piper (Piperaceae) and their ant inhabitants. American Midland Naturalist 98:433-444.
34. Risch, S. J., and F. R. Rickson. 1981. Mutualism in which ants must be present before plants produce food bodies. Nature 291:149-150.
35. SAS. 1990. SAS user's guide: statistics. SAS Institute, Cary, North Carolina, USA.
36. Schmitz, O. J. 1994. Resource edibility and trophic exploitation in an old-field food web. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (USA) 91:5364-5367.
37. Schmitz, O. J. 2003. Top predator conirol of planl biodiversily and productivity in an old-field ecosystem. Ecology Letters 6:1-8.
38. Schoener, T. W., and D. A. Spiller. 1996. Devastation of prey diversity by experimentally introduced predators in the field. Nature 381:691-694.
39. Shurin, J. B., E. T. Borer, E. W. Seabloom, A. Kurt, C. A. Blanchette, B. Broitman, S. C. Cooper, and B. S. Halpern. 2002. A cross-ecosysiem comparison of the strength of trophic cascades. Ecology Letters 5:785-791.
40. Sollins, P., F. M. Sancho, R. Mata Ch., and R. L. Sanford, Jr. 1994. Soils and soil process research. Pages 34-53 in L. A. McDade, K. S. Bawa, H. A. Hespenheide, and G. S. Hartshorn, editors. La Selva. Ecology and natural history of a Neotropical rain forest. University of Chicago Press, Chicago, Illinois, USA.
41. Spiller, D. A., and T. W. Schoener. 1990. A terrestrial field experiment showing the impact of eliminating top predators in foliage damage. Nature 347:469-472.
42. Spiller, D. A., and T. W. Schoener. 1994. Effects of top and intermediate predators in a terrestrial food web. Ecology 75:182-196.
43. Strong, D. R. 1992. Are trophic cascades all wet? Differentiation and donor control in speciose ecosystems. Ecology 73:747-754.
44. Terborgh, J., L. Lopez, P. Nuñez, M. Rao, G. Shahabuddin, G. Orihuela, M. Riveros, R. Ascanio, G. H. Adler, T. D. Lambert, and L. Balbas. 2001. Ecological meltdown in predalor-free forest fragments. Science 294:1923-1926.
45. Van Bail, S. A., J. D. Brawn, and S. K. Robinson. 2003. Birds defend trees from herbivores in a Neotropical forest canopy. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (USA) 100:8304-8307.
46. Vandermeer, J., and I. Perfecto. 1995. Breakfast of biodiversity: the truth about rainforest destruction. Institute for Food and Development Policy, Oakland, California, USA.
47. Wright, S. J. 2002. Plant diversity in tropical forests: a review of mechanisms of species coexistence. Oecologia 130:1-14.