The plant cuticle is the first physical barrier between land plants and their terrestrial
environment. It consists of the polyester scaffold cutin embedded and sealed with organic …

An overview of plant surface structures and their evolution is presented. It combines surface
chemistry and architecture with their functions and refers to possible biomimetic …

Biological surfaces provide multifunctional interfaces to their environment. More than 400
million years of land plants evolution led to a large diversity of functional biological surface …

While the importance of mutualisms across the tree of life is recognized, it is not understood
why some organisms evolve high levels of dependence on mutualistic partnerships, while …

Ants are probably the most dominant insect group on Earth, representing ten to fifteen
percent of animal biomass in terrestrial ecosystems. Flowering plants, meanwhile, owe their …

▪ Abstract Protective ant-plant interactions, important in both temperate and tropical
communities, are increasingly used to study a wide range of phenomena of general interest …

The first edition of Tropical Rain Forests: an Ecological and Biogeographical Comparison
exploded the myth of 'the rain forest'as a single, uniform entity. In reality, the major tropical …

The cuticle is a translucent film of polymeric lipids (Chapter 4) and soluble waxes (Chapter
5) located at the interface between a plant and its aerial environment. The cuticle is present …

In 1974 when I published my book, Biological Mechanism of Attachment, not many pages
were required to report on the attachment devices of insect cuticles. As in most fields of …

The protective wax coating on plant surfaces has long been considered to be non-uniform in
composition at a subcellular scale. In recent years, direct evidence has started to …