Ecology 6th Edition by Charles Krebs

Exercise 4

An early view of plant-herbivore interactions was that plants and their insect herbivores are engaged in an evolutionary arms race, and for many interactions pairwise coevolution was the dominant explanation for the observed patterns of plant defense. This view is not widely held now (Stamp 2003). Discuss why the evolutionary arms race analogy might not hold for plant-herbivore interactions.