Journal Article
No tree an island: the plant–caterpillar food web of a secondary rain forest in New Guinea
Vojtech Novotny; Scott E. Miller; Jan Leps; Yves Basset; Darren Bito; Milan Janda; Jiri Hulcr; Kipiro Damas; George D. Weiblen
Ecology Letters · Vol. 7, Issue 11 · pp. 1090-1100 · 2004
Abstract
We characterized a plant–caterpillar food web from secondary vegetation in a New Guinean rain forest that included 63 plant species (87.5% of the total basal area), 546 Lepidoptera species and 1679 trophic links between them. The strongest 14 associations involved 50% of all individual caterpillars while some links were extremely rare. A caterpillar randomly picked from the vegetation will, with ≥ 50% probability, (1) feed on one to three host plants (of the 63 studied), (2) feed on