Herbivore Avoidance by Association: Vole and Hare Utilization of Woody Plants

Abstract

The probability that an individual plant will be attacked by a herbivore depends not only on the characteristics of the individual plant, but also on the quality and abundance of its neighbours. However, plants have been reported to receive protection from herbivory both when associated with plants of higher and lower palatability (the attractant-decoy and repellent-plant hypotheses, respectively), and there are no mechanistic explanation for these different outcomes of plant spatial association. We used patch-use theory (marginal-value theorem) to predict under which circumstances we should expect plants to gain protection from herbivory due to association with other plants