Using a simple optimization model, Lundberg and Astrom analyzed whether low nutritive quality in terms of low nutrient concentration can be a profitable anti-herbivory strategy for plants. Contrary to most studies, this has considered vertebrate herbivores feeding on discrete food items such as trees. The authors have shown that low nutritive quality , at least in terms of nutrient concentration, can be a profitable defense mechanism for individual plants attacked by optimally foraging herbivores. This conclusion is best suited to systems of browsers and trees (or shrubs) and it is not obvious whether this analysis has a more general validity. Only nutrient concentration as the measure of nutritive quality was considered and are therefore dealing with a common positive currency for both the plant and the herbivore. This model is consistent with the resource-availability hypothesis if it is assumed that low growth characteristic plants indeed are associated with poor habitats and high growth characteristic plants with rich habitats for reasons other than herbivory, and if you assumed that investments in carbon-based defenses are more or less independent of nutrient concentration. They also argued that the theory of optimal patch use might be a useful tool in analyzing the use of plants by herbivores.
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