Plants can modify the interactions between herbivorous insects and their natural enemies in various ways. Chemical defences from the plants against herbivores may in fact harm the latter's natural enemies, thereby weakening the trophic interaction. On the other hand, volatile chemicals produced by the plant in response to herbivory may attract natural enemies, thereby strengthening the interaction. Recent research shows that effects of plants on insect interactions are not curious phenomena confined to a few specialist species but rather that they are ubiquitous in terrestrial ecosystems and often involve complex interactions among many species. The major challenge now is to study how the commonly reported shortterm effects of plants affect long term dynamics of insect interactions in the context of complex natural communities.
IntroductionThe interactions between predators and their prey and parasitoids and their hosts have always been central to the interests of ecologists: they are fundamental to our understanding of population dynamics, community structure, and the (co-)evolution of many behavioural, morphological and physiological traits. As well as being of such broad fundamental interest, the application of trophic interactions in biological control means that they are of economic and food-security importance too. Among insects, trophic interactions more often than not take place on the food plant of the herbivorous prey/host. It is now clear that the plants are often far more than a passive arena on which these interactions take place and they can have major effects on the strength of trophic interactions among insects through two broad mechanisms ( Figure 1): first, plant defences that are deflected by the herbivores unto their own enemies, reducing the strength of the trophic interaction; second, plants producing volatile chemicals in response to herbivory which facilitate host/prey detection by natural enemies, and thus increase the strength of the interaction.These effects of plants on herbivore -natural enemy interactions can be considered in the conceptual framework of 'trait-mediated indirect effects' [1,2]. In the context of the above two mechanisms, this means that a plant indirectly affects the population growth rate of the natural enemy by affecting a herbivore trait (toxicity), and/or indirectly affects herbivore population growth rate by affecting a natural enemy trait (search efficiency). In either case the interaction between herbivore and natural enemy is modified and trait-mediated indirect effects are therefore also known as 'interaction modifications' [3]. These effects can have widespread consequences, affecting population dynamics, the co-existence of species and even the trophic network structure of ecological communities [4,5]. Given the dominance of plants and insects in biomass and biodiversity, plant-modified trophic interactions could therefore play a key role in terrestrial ecosystems. In this review I will focus on recent new evidence for these interaction modifications and I ...