http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1600-0706.2013.00251.x/abstract

Forister, M. L. and Wilson, J. S. (2013), The population ecology of novel plant–herbivore interactions. Oikos, 122: 657–666. doi: 10.1111/j.1600-0706.2013.00251.x

Many native herbivores are known to attack exotic plants, and we can expect these interactions to occur with increasing frequency in coming years as invasive plants become naturalized and new invaders arrive in native communities. In some cases, evolutionary biologists and ecologists have learned a great deal from insects adapting to novel hosts. However, there is more to be learned and we suggest that the ecological study of exotic host colonization by native insects has been impeded by a lack of focus in the questions being asked, and also from overlap with other areas of plant–insect ecology, including the study of specialization. In the present paper, a conceptual model is described for the colonization of a novel host-plant, which focuses on the relationship between occupancy and availability. Occupancy is the fraction of patches of novel hosts that are utilized by an herbivore, and availability is the abundance or presence of a novel host on the landscape. Considering the slope of that relationship (between occupancy and availability), hypotheses are suggested that involve dispersal and, most important, population growth rate of an insect herbivore associated with an exotic host. A focus on the occupancy–availability relationship highlights the strengths and weaknesses of common experimental approaches, such as preference–performance experiments. Suggestions for future work are offered that include integration with evolutionary theory and exploration of more complex demographic and ecological scenarios.

许多本地食草动物取食外来植物，随着本地群落中入侵植物的本地化和新入侵种的到来这类关系在未来几年发生的频率会不断增加。进化生物学家和生态学家们已经从一些例子中了解到许多关于昆虫适应新宿主的知识。然而，未知的东西还很多，我们提出本地昆虫外来宿主扩张方面的生态研究已经受到缺少有针对性的研究问题以及所研究的问题与其它植物－昆虫生态学（包括物种形成方面的研究）重叠的阻碍。本文介绍了一个理论框架来指导针对占有率和可获得性之间关系的新宿主植物扩张研究。占有率是被食草者利用了的新宿主的比例，可获得性是环境中新宿主的丰富度或是否有无。关于占有率和可获得性之间关系的强度，我们提出包含了扩散和与外来宿主相关的食草昆虫的种群生长率（这是最重要的）的假说。集中研究占有率和可获得性之间关系凸显出了常用研究方法（比如偏好－表现试验）的优缺点。对未来的工作我们提出了建议，包括与进化理论整合和探索更复杂的种群和生态情景。