This U.S.-Brazil planning visit will support Drs. Phyllis D. Coley and Thomas A. Kursar, both of the University of Utah, to initiate a promising international collaboration with Dr. Maristerra Lemes of the Instituto National de Pesquisas da Amazonia (INPA) in Brazil on a project to study the ecology and chemical defenses of the tropical legume tree, Inga. Plants and herbivores make up the majority of the earth's biodiversity and their interactions are extremely intense in tropical forests. The evolutionary interaction between herbivores and plants has led to an "arms race" in which innovation in plant defenses are met by counter adaptations on the part of herbivores. In tropical forests, the vast majority of herbivory occurs on young rather than mature leaves and there is enormous variation in damage among species, yet little is known as to the underlying cause of this variation.
Beginning in 2002, the PI established the Inga project in Panama and this visit will represent the first geographic expansion of their work out of Panama. The objective of the visit to colleagues in Brazil is to establish a collaboration studying Inga in the Amazon where it is particularly diverse and abundant. Using a phylogenetic approach, the project will examine the nature and activity of secondary metabolites in young leaves of a number of Inga species, and correlate this with other plant defenses, and with actual damage rates in the field. Methods include analyses of plant chemistry, feeding trials with herbivores to assess toxicity, and field quantification of herbivory, leafing phenology and the construction of a phylogenetic tree.
