Plant-Insect Interactions

Plants and insects are highly diverse groups due to their ability to exploit a wide range of niches, from the desert to the arctic zone, and also almost all the plant species growing on the planet. Plants and insects make up together approximately half of all known species of multicellular organisms. Each plant interacts with insects in a different manner; insects may act as protection, dispersers, or fertilizers for plants, while plants may be a food/energy resource or nest location for insects. Starting with herbivory, plant-insect interactions date back to the Devonian period, about 420 million years ago, when plants first began their conquest of the land. But it was most probably in the Upper Carboniferous, about 320 million years ago, that these interactions became more intense, characterized also by the appearance of entomophily (i.e., insect pollination) about 252 million years ago, before the appearance of flowering plants (angiosperms).