#herbivory — Public Fediverse posts

I love how delightfully diabolical evolution can be.

A new article in Annual Review of Entomology is about the plant pathogens that are vectored between plants by herbivorous insects. These plant pathogens invade plant tissues and make plants sick. To get between plants they hitch a ride inside plant-feeding insects. The healthier the insect the more plants it will feed on.

So, what do the microbes do? They manufacture chemicals that make their insect hosts stronger. Several ways that they do this have been discovered "from balancing a nutritionally deficient diet" to "upgrading its defensive biochemistry against natural enemies."

Wild!

"Plant Pathogens Moonlighting as Beneficial Insect Symbionts" by
Aileen Berasategui and Hassan Salem

https://www.annualreviews.org/content/journals/10.1146/annurev-ento-121423-013411

#entomology #SpeciesInteractions #mutualism #ecology #PlantPathogens #Herbivory #insects

Scientists Discover One of the Earliest Mammal Ancestors That Ate Its Veggies: The new finding pushes the first signs of tetrapod #herbivory back millions of years https://www.smithsonianmag.com/blogs/national-museum-of-natural-history/2023/04/05/smithsonian-scientists-discover-one-of-the-earliest-mammal-ancestors-that-ate-its-veggies/

A new #Carboniferous #edaphosaurid and the origin of herbivory in #mammal forerunners https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-023-30626-8

#Melanedaphodon’s teeth, which end in bulbous points, are unique. But they do possess some similarities to the chompers of #Edaphosaurus and living #lizards that eat plants as part of their diets.