Meeting Abstract

S6.3  Monday, Jan. 5  The emerging role for pharmacology in understanding marine plant-herbivore interactions SOTKA, Erik E.; College of Charleston sotkae@cofc.edu

The past 25 years of research on marine plant-herbivore interactions have witnessed remarkable advances in our understanding of the secondary metabolites that marine plants use to protect themselves from being consumed by their herbivores. In contrast, we have virtually no knowledge on the biochemical mechanisms employed by marine herbivores to detoxify secondary metabolites. Arguably, the state of the field is equivalent to that of terrestrial herbivore ecologists in the early 1970s: the marine literature documents profound variation in feeding tolerance among herbivores without a thorough understanding of why this variation exists (ultimate mechanisms) and how this variation exists (proximate mechanisms). Here, I will outline a series of vexing issues in the ecology and evolution of marine plant-herbivore interactions that will likely benefit from a molecular approach to detoxification mechanisms. These issues include: do detoxification rates limit the feeding rates of herbivores and thus their ecological and evolutionary impact on marine ecosystems? Are marine herbivores and plants entangled in a diffuse coevolutionary arms-race? Is the host range of marine herbivores mediated by feeding tolerance for secondary metabolites? Can we predict herbivore diversity-ecosystem function relationships based on the diversity of detoxification mechanisms? I will make the argument that a focus on enzyme-compound interactions will allow us to move beyond a more-traditional approach that simply correlates feeding choices with plant traits. Translating population- and species-level variation in feeding tolerance into variation at the biochemical level represents the next great challenge for marine chemical ecologists and their interdisciplinary collaborators, but should offer tremendous insight into the evolutionary ecology of marine herbivores.