Decoupled Plant and Insect Diversity After the End-Cretaceous Extinction

@article{Wilf2006DecoupledPA,
  title={Decoupled Plant and Insect Diversity After the End-Cretaceous Extinction},
  author={Peter Wilf and Conrad C. Labandeira and Kirk R. Johnson and Bethany Ellis},
  journal={Science},
  year={2006},
  volume={313},
  pages={1112 - 1115}
}
Food web recovery from mass extinction is poorly understood. We analyzed insect-feeding damage on 14,999 angiosperm leaves from 14 latest Cretaceous, Paleocene, and early Eocene sites in the western interior United States. Most Paleocene floras have low richness of plants and of insect damage. However, a low-diversity 64.4-million-year-old flora from southeastern Montana shows extremely high insect damage richness, especially of leaf mining, whereas an anomalously diverse 63.8-million-year-old… 
View on AAAS
repository.si.edu
134 Citations
Highly Influential Citations
10
Background Citations
56
Methods Citations
3
Results Citations
1

134 Citations

The End-Cretaceous Extinction and Ecosystem Change
Examination of fossil plant–insect associations in the continental realm and trace fossils in the marine realm provide considerable data for understanding organismic response to major ecological…
Insect-damaged fossil leaves record food web response to ancient climate change and extinction.
  • P. Wilf
  • Environmental Science, Geography
    The New phytologist
  • 2008
TLDR
Recent work on the time interval from the latest Cretaceous through the middle Eocene is emphasized, including two significant events that affected life: the end-Cretaceous mass extinction and its ensuing recovery; and globally warming temperatures across the Paleocene-Eocene boundary.
Novel Insect Leaf-Mining after the End-Cretaceous Extinction and the Demise of Cretaceous Leaf Miners, Great Plains, USA
TLDR
The results strongly relate the high damage diversity on the depauperate Mexican Hat flora to an influx of novel insect herbivores during the early Paleocene, possibly caused by a transient warming event and range expansion, and indicate drastic extinction rather than survivorship of Cretaceous insect taxa from refugia.
No post-Cretaceous ecosystem depression in European forests? Rich insect-feeding damage on diverse middle Palaeocene plants, Menat, France
TLDR
The results show that the end-Cretaceous event did not cause a uniform, long-lasting depression of global terrestrial ecosystems, Rather, it gave rise to varying regional patterns of ecological collapse and recovery that appear to have been strongly influenced by distance from the Chicxulub structure.
Rapid recovery of Patagonian plant–insect associations after the end-Cretaceous extinction
TLDR
The results support the emerging idea of large-scale geographic heterogeneity in extinction and recovery from the end-Cretaceous catastrophe.
Diverse Plant-Insect Associations from the Latest Cretaceous and Early Paleocene of Patagonia, Argentina
Abstract. Little is known about the recovery of terrestrial ecosystems after the end-Cretaceous extinction outside of the Western Interior of North America, relatively close to the 66 Ma bolide…
Sharply increased insect herbivory during the Paleocene–Eocene Thermal Maximum
TLDR
This study uses plant fossils from the Bighorn Basin of Wyoming to document the combined effects of temperature and pCO2 on insect herbivory, and suggests that increased insect Herbivory is likely to be a net long-term effect of anthropogenic p CO2 increase and warming temperatures.
Ecology and Evolution of Gall-Inducing Arthropods: The Pattern From the Terrestrial Fossil Record
  • C. Labandeira
  • Environmental Science, Geography
    Frontiers in Ecology and Evolution
  • 2021
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…
Why Did Terrestrial Insect Diversity Not Increase During the Angiosperm Radiation? Mid-Mesozoic, Plant-Associated Insect Lineages Harbor Clues
TLDR
A reanalysis was done of a new dataset of 280 plant-associated insect families spanning the 174 million year interval of the Jurassic–Paleogene periods, finding that herbivores and pollinators, exophagous feeders, and those hosting gymnosperms, angiosperms and gymnosperm → angiosperm transitions most affected during this interval.
Insect herbivory patterns in late Eocene coastal lowland riparian associations from central Germany
...
...

References

SHOWING 1-10 OF 54 REFERENCES
Richness of plant-insect associations in Eocene Patagonia: a legacy for South American biodiversity.
TLDR
Significant more damage diversity is found at Laguna del Hunco than in the North American floras, whether measured on bulk collections or on individual plant species, for both damage morphotypes and feeding groups.
Impact of the terminal Cretaceous event on plant–insect associations
Evidence for a major extinction of insect herbivores is provided by presence–absence data for 51 plant–insect associations on 13,441 fossil plant specimens, spanning the Cretaceous/Paleogene boundary…
A Tropical Rainforest in Colorado 1.4 Million Years After the Cretaceous-Tertiary Boundary
TLDR
Orographic conditions caused by local topography, combined with equable climate, appear to have allowed for the establishment of rainforests within 1.4 million years of the K-T boundary.
Pelagic evolution and environmental recovery after the Cretaceous-Paleogene mass extinction
The evolutionary recovery of planktic foraminifera from the Cretaceous-Paleogene mass extinction was closely linked to recovery of the marine carbon system. Both the evolutionary recovery and the…
South American palaeobotany and the origins of neotropical rainforests.
  • R. BurnhamKirk R. Johnson
  • Environmental Science, Geography
    Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences
  • 2004
TLDR
It is indicated that evidence of neotropical rainforest is exceedingly rare and equivocal before the Palaeocene, and a mismatch of evidence regarding the age of origin between sites of palaeobotanical high diversity and sites of predicted tropical climates should be reconciled with intensified collecting efforts in South America.
Does Herbivore Diversity Depend on Plant Diversity? The Case of California Butterflies
TLDR
It is found that although plant and butterfly diversities are positively correlated, multiple regression, path models, and spatial analysis indicate that once primary productivity and topographical variability are incorporated into models, neither measure of plant richness has any relationship with butterfly richness.
Organic carbon fluxes and ecological recovery from the cretaceous-tertiary mass extinction
TLDR
Under this hypothesis, marine production may have recovered shortly after the mass extinction, but the structure of the open-ocean ecosystem did not fully recover for more than 3 million years.
Evidence for an in situ early Paleocene rainforest from Castle Rock, Colorado
A very diverse, early Paleocene (63.8 ± 0.3 Ma) fossil leaf site located in Castle Rock, Colorado represents nearly autochthonous burial of a rainforest floor. This is an unusual fossil flora…
HERBIVORY AND PLANT DEFENSES IN TROPICAL FORESTS
TLDR
Folivorous mammals do less damage than insects or pathogens but have evolved to cope with the high levels of plant defenses and, along with insect herbivores, may contribute to the maintenance of tree diversity.
Geochemical evidence for suppression of pelagic marine productivity at the Cretaceous/Tertiary boundary
The normal, biologically productive ocean is characterized by a gradient of the 13C/12C ratio from surface to deep waters. Here we present stable isotope data from planktonic and benthic…
...
...