Stoichiometric plant-herbivore models and their interpretation

The purpose of this note is to mechanistically formulate a math-ematically tractable model that specifically deals with the dynamics of plant-herbivore interaction in a closed phosphorus (P)-limiting environment. The key to our approach is the employment of the plant cell P quota and the Droop equation for its growth. Our model takes the simple form of a system of two autonomous ordinary differential equations. It can be shown that our model includes the LKE model (Loladze, Kuang and Elser (2000)) as a special case. Our study reveals that the details of ecological stoichiometry models really matter for quantitative predictions of plant-herbivore dynamics, especially atintermediate ranges of the carrying capacity.