Unapparent trees: escaping enemies in time by being discreet, unpredictable and inaccessible

For half a century, biologists considered trees as particularly apparent to their enemies. But why then do some trees escape herbivorous enemies by bursting buds either too early or too late, leading to phenological mismatch? We hypothesize that such mismatches occur on trees that are unapparent in time—those that burst buds “discreetly” (slowly) and unpredictably (inconsistently across years), and are difficult to access (host trees among non-hosts). We studied herbivores on oaks in Western France. We for the first-time characterized phenology matching of an entire guild of herbivores, early spring ectophagous caterpillars (45 species). We examined whether, on a given date, caterpillars have a large body size and impact (herbivory), and whether this size or impact is largest on trees that burst buds earliest. Furthermore, we distinguished the contributions of within-guild sorting of species and within-population selection of individuals to phenology matching, we investigated whether pr..., , # Unapparent trees: escaping enemies in time by being discreet, unpredictable and inaccessible

Dataset DOI: [10.5061/dryad.nzs7h452t](10.5061/dryad.nzs7h452t)

## Description of the data and file structure

The data are also given in the Supplementary document, and are described there.

### Files and variables

#### File: Caterpillar-Data-Unapparent-trees.csv

**Description:** This file contains data on caterpillars, including their length measured within two days of field collection. It also includes characteristics of the host trees from which the caterpillars were collected, such as budburst timing, budburst speed, within-crown heterogeneity of budburst, and phylogenetic and spatial distances from neighbouring trees. Entries marked as \"NA\" indicate that data were not available for those specific cases.

##### Variables

* Row.number: Unique row number
* Year: Year of sampling i.e. 2010 or 2011 or 2019
* Tree: Unique identification number of the trees
* Budburst.DOY: Day of the year ...,