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Predator population size structure alters consumption of prey from epigeic and grazing food webs

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Abstract

Numerous studies have found that predators can suppress prey densities and thereby impact important ecosystem processes such as plant productivity and decomposition. However, prey suppression by spiders can be highly variable. Unlike predators that feed on prey within a single energy channel, spiders often consume prey from asynchronous energy channels, such as grazing (live plant) and epigeic (soil surface) channels. Spiders undergo few life cycle changes and thus appear to be ideally suited to link energy channels, but ontogenetic diet shifts in spiders have received little attention. For example, spider use of different food channels may be highly specialized in different life stages and thus a species may be a multichannel omnivore only when we consider all life stages. Using stable isotopes, we investigated whether wolf spider (Pardosa littoralis, henceforth Pardosa) prey consumption is driven by changes in spider size. Small spiders obtained > 80% of their prey from the epigeic channel, whereas larger spiders used grazing and epigeic prey almost equally. Changes in prey consumption were not driven by changes in prey density, but by changes in prey use by different spider size classes. Thus, because the population size structure of Pardosa changes dramatically over the growing season, changes in spider size may have important implications for the strength of trophic cascades. Our research demonstrates that life history can be an important component of predator diet, which may in turn affect community- and ecosystem-level processes.

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Data availability

Data are available from the Dryad Digital Repository: https://doi.org/10.5061/dryad.jq2bvq868.

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Acknowledgements

Ken Able at the Rutgers University Marine Station facilitated our research at the Tuckerton field site. We thank M. Brabson, M. Douglas, B. Herb, D. McCaskill, and L. Power for their help in the field. We thank A. Adams, S. Apgar, K. Barker, M. Barker, E. Barnes, G. Connor, K. Grenis, C. Hallagan, B. Herb, K. Loewy, M. Lynch, J. McCarty, B. Rojewski, A. Styer, and S. Wu for helping in processing the samples in the lab. We thank E. Horna Lowell, C. Hallagan, and J. Wilson for their helpful comments on an earlier version of this manuscript. This research was supported by the National Science Foundation (NSF-DEB 1026067 to GMW; NSF-DEB 1026000 to SMM).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Biological Sciences, University of Denver, Denver, CO, 80208, USA

    Shannon M. Murphy

  2. Biology Department, Georgetown University, Washington, DC, 20057, USA

    Danny Lewis & Gina M. Wimp

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  1. Shannon M. Murphy
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  2. Danny Lewis
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All authors conceived the ideas, designed methodology, and collected the data. DL performed the statistical analyses. SM and GW led the writing of the manuscript; all authors contributed critically to the drafts and gave final approval for publication.

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Correspondence to Shannon M. Murphy.

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Communicated by Liliane Ruess.

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Murphy, S.M., Lewis, D. & Wimp, G.M. Predator population size structure alters consumption of prey from epigeic and grazing food webs. Oecologia 192, 791–799 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00442-020-04619-7

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