Marine plants and their herbivores: coevolutionary myth and precarious mutualisms

Abstract

Planktonic and benthic algal-herbivore interactions are reviewed. In many cases, generation times of plant and herbivore are similar, yet there is no clear example of a coevolutionary arms race. Mutualisms have evolved, but these are vulnerable to extinction. We suggest that this vulnerability is caused by the loss of evolutionary flexibility accompanying the tightly linked, coadapted gene complexes.