California Oak Herbivory

Plants and their insect herbivores comprise over half of all described nonmicrobial species and interact in ways that influence key community- and ecosystem-level processes. The Apparency Hypothesis suggests that plant species that are more “apparent” (long-lived, large, evergreen) to herbivores have evolved stronger anti-herbivore defenses than not-so-apparent plants (short-lived, small, deciduous), but empirical tests of this hypothesis have yielded inconsistent results. For my undergraduate honors thesis with Professor Rodolfo Dirzo, I examined whether the apparency hypothesis applied to four sympatric species of California oak.

You can read more about my research here or you can listen to me talk about oak herbivores in a guest interview with the Santa Cruz Naturalist podcast.