This week we celebrate a hot paper in the press by Ph.D. student Nash Turley (Johnson Lab). Nash’s paper: “Contemporary evolution of plant growth rate following experimental removal of herbivores” is soon to be published in The American Naturalist. In this paper, Nash and his collaborators removed intense rabbit grazing from multiple populations of the plant Common Sorrel for <1 to 26 years. He then used a common garden study to assess whether relaxed selection by herbivores resulted in evolution of decreased plant defenses. He found that plants that experienced more recent herbivory grew faster, presumably to replace constantly grazed tissue, than plants that had been protected from herbivores for long periods of time. Surprisingly chemical defenses were unchanged following the removal of rabbits. These results shown that plants can rapidly adapt in response to the presence/absence of herbivores, and such defenses need not be mediated by toxic chemicals.
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