Should you be keeping score at home, the insects are winning. Today they claim 7.5 to 12 percent of our foliage. Paleoentomologists associate different damage with a variety of strategies that may change as plants and insects coevolve. Some damage is obvious and familiar to anybody who has ever looked casually at leaves and noticed that some look like they have had holes punched in them, or has seen a tree denuded of its foliage by caterpillars. As fly, beetle, moth and other tiny larvae eat their way through a leaf's innards, they leave typical patterns that look like minuscule mole paths.
Damage also can be quite literally galling.
A gall is a tumorlike nodule made by the plant in response to infestation. A culprit at Republic appears to be the gall midge. The insect lives in the gall and lays its eggs right in the plant tissue. Labandeira worries that paleobiologists may not be sampling much of the Eocene herbaceous vegetation. Herbaceous vegetation is at the receiving end of much of the herbivory in modern communities.