The ecology and evolution of inducible defenses

Inducible defenses are responses activated through a previous encounter with a consumer or competitor that confer some degree of resistance to subsequent attacks. While the importance of inducible resistance has long been known in host-parasite interactions, it is only recently that its importance has emerged in other natural systems. Although the structural defenses produced by invertebrates to their competitors and predators are by no means the same as an immune response triggered by parasites, these responses all share the properties of (1) specificity, (2) amplification and (3) memory. This review discusses the following ecological consequences and evolutionary causes of inducible defenses: (1) Inducible defenses render historical factors important in biological interactions and can affect the probability of individual survival and growth, as well as affect population dynamics of consumers in some circumstances. (2) Although the benefits of inducible defenses are often balanced by fitness costs, including reduced growth, reproductive output and survivorship, the role of costs and benefits in the evolution of inducible defenses is by no means clear. A more integrated approach would involve a multivariate analysis of the role of natural selection on the inducible characters of interest, their norms of reaction and correlated fitness characters. (3) The disproportionate representation of inducible, morphological defenses among clonal organisms may be due to both a higher rate of origination and enhanced selection to maintain these defenses in clonal taxa. (4) Inducible defenses should be most common when reliable cues are available, attacks by biological agents are unpredictable, and the fitness gains of defenses are balanced by the costs. An integrated approach to studying inducible defenses would thus combine mechanistic estimates of costs, population-level estimates of defense effectiveness, and genetic estimates of correlations between fitness and inducible characters. This will allow us to estimate rates of evolution in these phenotypically plastic threshold characters.