For an ecological study, you monitor herbivore-plant interactions in a rainforest and notice that mammalian herbivores avoid the leaves of a particular species of plant. However, a number of tiny herbivorous insect generalists that feed by piercing individual plant cells with their mouthparts appear capable of completing their entire life cycle feeding on this same species. You hypothesize that in this species the chemical defenses are:

answer;

a. sheep consumption efficiency would be reduced.

explanation;

-trophic efficiency is a measure of how much energy occurs at one level divided by the energy at the level immediately below it . trophic efficiency incorporates three types of efficiency:

-the proportion of available energy that is consumed (consumption efficiency).   it is the proportion of the available biomass that is ingested by consumers.

-the proportion of ingested food that is assimilated (assimilation efficiency).

-the proportion of assimilated food that goes into new consumer biomass (production efficiency).

-in this case, the grasshoppers would affect sheep by reducing the proportion of the available biomass that is ingested by the sheep.