| Herbivory has been studied in many forms, although the vast majority focuses on damage to leaves or stems. Damage to flowers, or florivory, has been relatively ignored in the literature, leaving a large gap in our understanding of how plants suffer from damage and defend themselves against florivores. This work describes four experimental studies and one synthetic section dealing with the consequences of florivory. The first chapter documents the effects of natural and artificial floral damage to the coastal annual plant, Nemophila menziesii. The second chapter shows how leaf damage, flower damage, and plant gender interact to affect maternal plant fitness in N. menziesii. Chapter three shows that N. menziesii can defend itself against florivores when receiving prior floral damage. This type of induced response has not been reported in the literature until this work. Chapter four also documents induced resistance in flowers, but in the annual Nicotiana attenuata. Finally, chapter five synthesizes the available work on florivory, describes how flower damage can affect plant fitness, and uses established theories of chemical defense to predict the timing and type of floral defense that we may find in natural populations. |
