Williamson Drive: Herbivory from a north-central Texas flora of latest Pennsylvanian age shows discrete component community structure, expansion of piercing and sucking, and plant counterdefenses

Xu, Qingqing; Jin, Jianhua; Labandeira, Conrad C.

doi:10.1016/j.revpalbo.2018.01.002

Cited by 45 publications

(94 citation statements)

References 86 publications

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“…The oldest flora, is the Late Pennsylvanian Epoch (late Gzhelian) Williamson Drive (WD) Flora, deposited in the perennially wet portion of a wetlands ecosystem (Xu et al 2018). The late Gzhelian of Euramerica was a relatively warm and wet interval of time.…”

Section: Locality Descriptionsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Understanding the ecology of host plant–insect herbivore interactions in the fossil record through bipartite networks

Swain

Maccracken

Fagan³

et al. 2021

Paleobiology

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Plant–insect associations have been a significant component of terrestrial ecology for more than 400 Myr. Exploring these interactions in the fossil record through novel perspectives provides a window into understanding evolutionary and ecological forces that shaped these interactions. For the past several decades, researchers have documented, described, and categorized fossil evidence of these interactions. Drawing on powerful tools from network science, we propose here a bipartite network representation of fossilized plants and their herbivore-induced leaf damage to understand late Paleozoic plant–insect interactions at the local community level. We focus on four assemblages from north-central Texas, but the methods used in this work are general and can be applied to any well-preserved fossil flora. Network analysis can address key questions in the evolution of insect herbivory that often would be difficult to summarize using standard herbivory metrics.

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Section: Locality Descriptionsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Understanding the ecology of host plant–insect herbivore interactions in the fossil record through bipartite networks

Swain

Maccracken

Fagan³

et al. 2021

Paleobiology

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“…NMDS addresses these potential differences in DT community composition. NMDS is typically performed with data at the level of functional feeding group rather than at the DT level (Wappler et al, 2009;Currano et al, 2010;Xu et al, 2018); functional feeding groups are the broad categories, such as galling and leaf mining, to which each DT is assigned. The use of coarser functional-feeding-group data is often intended to increase the signal-to-noise ratio (Currano et al, 2010).…”

Section: Metrics Of Insect Herbivorymentioning

confidence: 99%

“…At all three sites, all specimens over 0.5 cm 2 in surface area were analyzed for insect herbivory. Two other assemblages from the Permian of Texas, at the Coprolite Bone Bed and Taint localities, have also been analyzed for herbivory (Beck and Labandeira, 1998;Labandeira and Allen, 2007), as has one assemblage from the uppermost Carboniferous of Texas (Xu et al, 2018), but the original data are only available for MCF, CCP, and SAP.…”

Section: The Permian Of Texasmentioning

confidence: 99%

Sampling fossil floras for the study of insect herbivory: how many leaves is enough?

2020

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Abstract. Despite the great importance of plant–insect interactions to the functioning of terrestrial ecosystems, many temporal gaps exist in our knowledge of insect herbivory in deep time. Subsampling of fossil leaves, and subsequent extrapolation of results to the entire flora from which they came, is practiced inconsistently and according to inconsistent, often arbitrary criteria. Here we compare herbivory data from three exhaustively sampled fossil floras to establish guidelines for subsampling in future studies. The impact of various subsampling routines is evaluated for three of the most common metrics of insect herbivory: damage type diversity, nonmetric multidimensional scaling, and the herbivory index. The findings presented here suggest that a minimum fragment size threshold of 1 cm2 always yields accurate results and that a higher threshold of 2 cm2 should yield accurate results for plant hosts that are not polyphyletic form taxa. Due to the structural variability of the plant hosts examined here, no other a priori subsampling strategy yields consistently accurate results. The best approach may be a sequential sampling routine in which sampling continues until the 100 most recently sampled leaves have caused no change to the mean value or confidence interval for damage type diversity and have caused minimal or no change to the herbivory index. For nonmetric multidimensional scaling, at least 1000 cm2 of leaf surface area should be examined and prediction intervals should be generated to verify the relative positions of all points. Future studies should evaluate the impact of subsampling routines on floras that are collected based on different criteria, such as angiosperm floras for which the only specimens collected are those that are at least 50 % complete.

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“…During the past four decades, a considerable amount of data has been garnered to document the fossil history of insect and mite galls (Wittlake, 1969(Wittlake, , 1981Larew, 1986Larew, , 1992Stephenson, 1991;Scott et al, 2004) as a result of the broader study of examining plant-insect interactions that extends to a 385-million-year-long interval from the Recent (Carvalho et al, 2014) to Middle Devonian . Important fossil deposits occurring during this intervening time contain several floras with diverse galls that include, for the Paleozoic, the latest Pennsylvanian Williamson Drive flora of the Markley Formation (Fm) from Texas, United States (Xu et al, 2018), and the early Permian Colwell Creek Pond flora of the Middle Clear Fork Fm from Texas, United States . For the Mesozoic, the latest Early Cretaceous Rose Creek flora of the Dakota Fm from Nebraska, United States has 24 distinct gall types (Xiao and Labandeira, 2020: personal observation).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Ecology and Evolution of Gall-Inducing Arthropods: The Pattern From the Terrestrial Fossil Record

Labandeira

2021

Front. Ecol. Evol.

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Insect and mite galls on land plants have a spotty but periodically rich and abundant fossil record of damage types (DTs), ichnotaxa, and informally described gall morphotypes. The earliest gall is on a liverwort of the Middle Devonian Period at 385 million years ago (Ma). A 70-million-year-long absence of documented gall activity ensues. Gall activity resumes during the Pennsylvanian Period (315 Ma) on vegetative and reproductive axial organs of horsetails, ferns, and probably conifers, followed by extensive diversification of small, early hemipteroid galler lineages on seed-plant foliage during the Permian Period. The end-Permian (P-Tr) evolutionary and ecological crisis extinguished most gall lineages; survivors diversified whose herbivore component communities surpassed pre-P-Tr levels within 10 million years in the mid-to late Triassic (242 Ma). During the late Triassic and Jurassic Period, new groups of galling insects colonized Ginkgoales, Bennettitales, Pinales, Gnetales, and other gymnosperms, but data are sparse. Diversifying mid-Cretaceous (125–90 Ma) angiosperms hosted a major expansion of 24 gall DTs organized as herbivore component communities, each in overlapping Venn-diagram fashion on early lineages of Austrobaileyales, Laurales, Chloranthales, and Eurosidae for the Dakota Fm (103 Ma). Gall diversification continued into the Ora Fm (92 Ma) of Israel with another 25 gall morphotypes, but as ichnospecies on a different spectrum of plant hosts alongside the earliest occurrence of parasitoid attack. The End-Cretaceous (K-Pg) extinction event (66 Ma) almost extinguished host–specialist DTs; surviving gall lineages expanded to a pre-K-Pg level 10 million years later at the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum (PETM) (56 Ma), at which time a dramatic increase of land surface temperatures and multiplying of atmospheric pCO2 levels induced a significant level of increased herbivory, although gall diversity increased only after the PETM excursion and during the Early Eocene Climatic Optimum (EECO). After the EECO, modern (or structurally convergent) gall morphotypes originate in the mid-Paleogene (49–40 Ma), evidenced by the Republic, Messel, and Eckfeld floras on hosts different from their modern analogs. During subsequent global aridification, the early Neogene (20 Ma) Most flora of the Czech Republic records several modern associations with gallers and plant hosts congeneric with their modern analogs. Except for 21 gall DTs in New Zealand flora, the gall record decreases in richness, although an early Pleistocene (3 Ma) study in France documents the same plant surviving as an endemic northern Iran but with decreasing associational, including gall, host specificity.

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Williamson Drive: Herbivory from a north-central Texas flora of latest Pennsylvanian age shows discrete component community structure, expansion of piercing and sucking, and plant counterdefenses

Cited by 45 publications

References 86 publications

Understanding the ecology of host plant–insect herbivore interactions in the fossil record through bipartite networks

Understanding the ecology of host plant–insect herbivore interactions in the fossil record through bipartite networks

Sampling fossil floras for the study of insect herbivory: how many leaves is enough?

Ecology and Evolution of Gall-Inducing Arthropods: The Pattern From the Terrestrial Fossil Record

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