Talk:Plant defense against herbivory

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Go for it! (Please add citations)--Franciepants18 19:25, 30 March 2006 (UTC)

I´d like to add something to "Constitutive vs. Induced Defense"

"Why these defenses are inducible rather than constitutive?"

By "choosing" induced defense over constitutive defense, the plant will only allocate resources to defense that originally were supposed to go to growing, flowering (...), when strictly necessary, rather then allocating every time a part of the resources to constitutive defence. The disadvantage of induced defence is that it requires a certain period of time to take place after the attack begins. Depending on this period, the plant can be in risk while waiting for the substances to be synthesized and transported. In sum, the reliability of the INDUCED DEFENCE will depend on the plant´s chance of being attacked by herbivores and the time duration between the attack and the defense response.

As a general rule, the type of defense depends on the cost-benefit relatioship. To better understand the cost-benefit relationship we must consider the Optimal Defense Theory (that is further metioned), which is based on three factors:

1 - All plant defence has a cost, and resources used for plant defence cannot be used to others functions (as growing, flowering, seeding) at one time;

2 - The impact of a plant´s tissue loss depends on the significance of the affected plant tissue in a specific phenophase,physiological stage of development(exemple: During flowering phenophase, the most important part of the plant would be the flower);

3 - Some parts and tissues of plants has a greater chance to be attacked by herbivores than others (it reffers to the Apparency Theory).

So, we can assume that, the type of defense will be ruled by the plant´s chance of being attacked by herbivores, the physiological stage of development of the plant and the plant strategy to allocate resources.

e-mail: joaninha_sem_lacinho@yahoo.com.br

If anyone has pictures to add, please do so! --Franciepants18 21:39, 27 February 2006 (UTC)

[edit] footnotes references

I begin to reorganize references in footnotes (easier to read). I'm waiting for some feedback before to continue, because there are a lot of them! (maybe too much, citing sources is good policy but cutting some recent scientific research may help the standard reader). Besides that, i'm not a good english writer and some sentences must be modified if we replace the name if scientist by a footnote number. --alink 14:48, 4 July 2006 (UTC)

[edit] indirect defence

There is no mention in this article about indirect defence, where plants emit Volatile Organic Compounds to attract parasitoids of their herbivores. I am quite familiar with this subject, but I find it difficutl to embed it in this article. Maybe we can discuss?—The preceding unsigned comment was added by Jeroenemans (talk • contribs). 16:45, 2 February 2007 (UTC)

Seems like the section in the article called Indirect defenses would be a good place to include information on ....indirect defenses.--DO11.10 20:16, 2 February 2007 (UTC)