Neutrality in plant-herbivore interactions

Understanding the distribution of herbivore damage among leaves and individual plants is a central goal of plant-herbivore biology. Commonly observed unequal patterns of herbivore damage have conventionally been attributed to the heterogeneity in plant quality or herbivore behaviour or distribution. Meanwhile, the potential role of stochastic processes in structuring plant-herbivore interactions has been overlooked. Here, we show that based on simple first principle expectations from metabolic theory, random sampling of different sizes of herbivores from a regional pool is sufficient to explain patterns of variation in herbivore damage. This is despite making the neutral assumption that herbivory is caused by randomly feeding herbivores on identical and passive plants. We then compared its predictions against 765 datasets of herbivory on 496 species across 116° of latitude from the Herbivory Variability Network. Using only one free parameter, the estimated attack rate, our neutral model approximates the observed frequency distribution of herbivore damage among plants and especially among leaves very well. Our results suggest that neutral stochastic processes play a large and underappreciated role in natural variation in herbivory and may explain the low predictability of herbivory patterns. We argue that such prominence warrants its consideration as a powerful force in plant-herbivore interactions.