Evolutionary irony: evidence that ‘defensive’ plant spines act as a proximate cue to attract a mammalian herbivore

Many plants produce structural defenses to deter feeding by herbivores. However, many previous studies testing whether spines are effective at defending against mammalian herbivores have produced equivocal results. These ambiguous results are hypothesized to be due to herbivore counter‐adaptations. We investigated potential counter‐adaptations in a population of white‐throated woodrats Neotoma albigua that specialize on cactus by investigating feeding behavior and preference for cacti varying in spinescence. Neotoma albigula exhibited a unique behavior of clipping cactus spines, which renders these defenses ineffective. Strikingly, these woodrats chose to collect spiny cacti over experimentally de‐spined cacti, demonstrating that spines act as a proximal cue that attracts woodrats. This attraction is likely due to the higher protein and lower fiber content of spiny cacti compared to naturally non‐spiny cacti. Thus, the ‘defensive’ spines of cacti are ineffective against a specialist herbivore and instead serve as an indicator of nutritional quality that promotes herbivory. Our results support the ‘rule‐of‐thumb’ hypothesis of foraging, which states that herbivores forage according to obvious visual cues that are indicative of nutritional content, rather than sampling nutrient composition of plants. We propose that specialist herbivores are unique systems in which to study other counter‐adaptations to structural defenses and ‘rule‐of‐thumb’ foraging strategies.