Geographic Variation in the Growth Responses of Milkweed Plants to Damage

This is a presentation I gave at the Ecology Society of America meetings in the summer of 2019. It is about how plants from different regions respond to clipping damage or herbivory by monarch caterpillars and aphids. Common milkweed seems to be good at regrowing! One interesting result is that soil characteristics at the site where a plant comes from are correlated with some of the traits we observe in damaged plants. This makes me wonder if plants are adapted to different local soil characteristics.