Norris Z Muth

Juniata College · Department of Biology

We assessed variation in feeding preference of Cambarus bartonii (Appala-chian Brook Crayfish) for stocked Salmo trutta (Brown Trout) or wild Salvelinus fontinalis (Brook Trout) across 8 central Pennsylvania headwater streams with different recent exposures to trout stocking. In separate trials, we allowed crayfish to interact with and choose betwe...

Here we characterize and compare the diversity of belowground fungal communities of maples (Sapindaceae: Acer) varying in both nativity and weediness, and interpret our findings in the context of multiple non-exclusive theories on tree invasions and fungal associations. We made our fungal community comparisons based on high-throughput Illumina sequ...

The article discusses that most plants that constitutes the natural landscape are largely invasive species that are not common to the a particular area's ecological foundation.

Tree-of-Heaven (TOH) is a highly invasive woody species incurring substantial investment in control efforts across its extensive adventive range. A recently isolated strain of the fungus Verticillium albo-atrum has been found to cause near 100 % mortality of TOH in laboratory and field tests. We assessed plant communities in experimentally infected...

Walnut trees have long had a bad reputation. In ancient Rome, Pliny the Elder complained that it "causes headache in man and injury to anything planted in its vicinity." More re-cently, in the 19 th century, farmers bemoaned damage to crops planted adjacent to or under black walnut and some warned of the "poisonous nature of the drip." Throughout t...

Background/Question/Methods The last decade has seen a substantial spike in studies on allelopathy and allelopathic interactions. This trend is particularly interesting as claims about allelopathy have historically been controversial, largely due to experimental difficulties in separating its effects from those of resource competition and other p...

Theoretically, induced defenses should be prevalent within low resource environments like the forest understory where constitutive defenses would be costly. Also, the induced response should be stronger when the herbivore is a generalist rather than a specialist, which often have mechanisms to avoid or overcome plant defenses. These ideas have been...

Leaf chemistry and physiology vary with light environment and are often thought to directly affect herbivory patterns. Biotic (e.g., parasitoids and predators) and abiotic (e.g., temperature, relative humidity) factors known to influence herbivory also co-vary with light environment. Irrespective of mechanism, light-based differences in herbivore d...

Predation of herbivorous Lepidoptera larvae by insectivorous avifauna was estimated on Lindera benzoin in edge and interior habitats at two sites in eastern Pennsylvania (USA). Clay baits modeled after Epimecis hortaria (Geometridae) larvae, the primary herbivore of L. benzoin at our study sites, were used to estimate predation by birds. In both ha...

Summary • It is widely considered that phenotypic plasticity is important to species invasiveness. However, few empirical studies have expressly assessed the relationship between species invasiveness and their responses to environmental variability. Thoughtfully incorporating phenotypic plasticity into studies of invasiveness requires explicit link...

Invasion biologists often suggest that phenotypic plasticity plays an important role in successful plant invasions. Assuming that plasticity enhances ecological niche breadth and therefore confers a fitness advantage, recent studies have posed two main hypotheses: (1) invasive species are more plastic than non-invasive or native ones; (2) populatio...

In attempting to determine the traits associated with invasive plant species, ecologists have often used species native to the invaded range as "control species." Because many native species themselves are aggressive colonizers, comparisons using this type of control do not necessarily yield information relevant to distinctions between invasive and...

Biological invasion is one aspect of ecosystem function that may be controlled by the biological diversity of the invaded community, and there have been a number of recent studies that investigated relationships between diversity and invasibility. Most experimental studies report that higher species or functional group diversity increases resistanc...

Global biological diversity has come under increasing pressure from the spread of invasive alien species. Unchecked spread of non-native species often results in habitat degradation and can decimate populations of rare and endemic species. The shortcomings of an exotic species control program that fails to integrate ecology and policy is illustrate...