Mixing nutrients mitigates the intake constraints of a plant toxin in a generalist herbivore

Carolyn L. Nersesian, Peter B. Banks, Stephen J. Simpson and Clare McArthur

Behavioral Ecology, 2012, vol. 23, issue 4, 879-888

Abstract: The diversity and concentration of primary plant compounds, including nutrients and secondary metabolites, such as plant toxins differ spatially and temporally among food resources, creating a varied feeding environment for herbivores. Both nutrients and toxins influence foraging behavior, but their interactive effects remain poorly understood. Our aim was to determine how patterns of intake and feeding behavior are influenced by the nutritional composition of foods as modified by the presence of toxins and the capacity to choose between nutritionally different foods. We offered common brushtail possums, a generalist mammalian herbivore, a choice between 2 food mixtures, one high in protein (HP), the other high in carbohydrate (HC), or a no-choice diet formulated to reflect the mixture of protein and carbohydrate selected when animals had access to both HP and HC foods. We tested choice and no-choice dietary regimes in the presence or absence of the toxin, cineole, at a concentration known to limit intake by ∼50%. We found that possums could compensate for the effect of a high concentration of cineole on food intake if they could mediate dietary concentrations of the HP and HC foods. They appeared to do this by 1) selecting an increased proportion of dietary protein and 2) by continually adjusting the proportion of protein and carbohydrate eaten throughout a feeding night. Our results demonstrate that the protective effect of cineole against herbivory by possums is not a simple function of its concentration but rather depends strongly on the nutritional context in which it occurs.

Date: 2012
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1093/beheco/ars049 (application/pdf)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:oup:beheco:v:23:y:2012:i:4:p:879-888.

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://academic.oup.com/journals

Access Statistics for this article

Behavioral Ecology is currently edited by Louise Barrett

More articles in Behavioral Ecology from International Society for Behavioral Ecology Oxford University Press, Great Clarendon Street, Oxford OX2 6DP, UK.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Oxford University Press ().