Abstract
Herbivore diet breadth is predicted to evolve in response to both bottom-up and top-down selective pressures, including host plant abundance, quality and natural enemy pressure. As the relative importance and strength of interactions change over an herbivore’s geographic range, local patterns of host plant use should change in response, altering local diet breadths. Fall webworm (Hyphantria cunea) is a widespread, polyphagous moth species that feeds on hundreds of plant species worldwide. Populations of fall webworm in Colorado remain polyphagous, but their diet breadth is restricted compared to other populations and thus present an ideal opportunity to test the ecological drivers of host use by a polyphagous herbivore. We investigated how host abundance, larval performance, and parasitism affect host use for fall webworm to test how these selective pressures may act individually or in concert, as well as the role of any trade-offs among fitness components, to explain diet breadth and host use. We found that host abundance was a significant predictor of host use, which suggests a selective pressure to reduce search time for oviposition sites by adult females. We also detected an important trade-off between bottom-up and top-down selective pressures: higher quality host plants also had a greater proportion of larval mortality due to parasitism. Local patterns of host plant abundance appear to narrow the set of hosts used by fall webworms in Colorado, while the trade-off between host quality and risk of parasitism helps explain the maintenance of a generalized feeding strategy within this restricted set of hosts.
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Acknowledgments
We thank Amy Flansburg, Kylee Grenis, MacKenzie Kjeldgaard, Jennifer McCarty, Timothy McGowan, Lily Montesano, and Jennifer Vernick for their help in the field and/or lab as well as Martin Quigley for help with plant identification. We would like to thank Boulder County Open Space, City of Boulder Open Space and Mountain Parks, Fort Collins Natural Areas, and Jefferson County Open Space for granting research permits and their support of our research. We also thank the numerous homeowners who granted us access to their property. We thank members of the University of Denver organismal group, the plant-animal interactions group at the University of Colorado, Martin Quigley, Tom Quinn, Anna Sher, Teresa Stoepler, John Lill and two anonymous reviewers for helpful comments on earlier drafts of this manuscript that greatly improved its quality. This research was supported by the University of Denver through startup funds awarded to Shannon Murphy.
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Communicated by Andreas Prinzing.
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Murphy, S.M., Loewy, K.J. Trade-offs in host choice of an herbivorous insect based on parasitism and larval performance. Oecologia 179, 741–751 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00442-015-3373-8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00442-015-3373-8