Are all forms of defence lost on islands? Persistence of a defensive mutualism in six island colonists from New Zealand

The loss of defence hypothesis posits that island colonizers experience a release from predation on the mainland and subsequently lose their defensive adaptations. However, while support for the hypothesis from direct defensive traits is abundant, far less is known about indirect defensive traits. Leaf domatia are cave-like structures produced on the underside of leaves that facilitate an indirect defensive interaction with predaceous and microbivorous mites. I tested the loss of defence hypothesis in six domatia-bearing taxa inhabiting New Zealand and its offshore islands. No support for the loss of defence hypothesis was found. Changes in domatia investment were instead associated with changes in leaf size—a trait that has been repeatedly observed to undergo rapid evolution on islands. Overall results suggest that not all types of defence are lost on islands.

• Publication year

  2023

• Venue

  Biology Letters

• Publication date

  2023-04-01

• Fields of study

  Biology, Medicine, Environmental Science

• Identifiers
  DOI 10.1098/rsbl.2022.0425PMID 37073525PMCID PMC10114016
• External record

  Open on Semantic Scholar

• Source metadata

  Semantic Scholar, PubMed

• No claims are published for this paper.

• No concepts are published for this paper.

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