Abstract
Drought threatens arthropod communities worldwide. Water limitation affects the quantity and quality of plants available to herbivores as food, and can also affect higher trophic-level consumers through variability in prey quality and reduced availability of suitable habitats. Our study assessed the response of an arthropod community to water limited wheat (Triticum aestivum L.) in a field setting. We used rainout shelters to exclude precipitation, irrigated raised bed plots to create three levels of water availability, and monitored arthropod community development over 8 weeks. First, we compared arthropod communities in habitats with different levels of water limitation and found that community composition was reliant on the magnitude of the water stress. This difference was largely due to the loss of piercing–sucking herbivores and predators in high-stress environments. Next, we focused on aphids and their natural enemies to investigate the underlying mechanisms driving community responses using structural equation modeling (SEM). Aphid abundance was negatively affected by water limitation, and this response was primarily associated with stress-induced plant physiological changes and not plant biomass or natural enemy abundance. Natural enemy abundance was also reduced in water-limited habitats, but natural enemies responded to plant biomass and not prey availability. These effects were exacerbated as water stress increased. The absence of natural enemy effects on aphids indicates that top–down predation effects were dampened by strong bottom–up effects of plant water limitation. This study revealed the importance of considering water stress intensity when predicting outcomes of droughts for arthropod communities.
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Data availability
The datasets generated during and/or analyzed during the current study are available from the corresponding author on reasonable request.
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Acknowledgements
We thank Bruce Hibbard, Felix Fritschi, and Abe Koo for contributing to the development of the research and providing comments on the manuscript. Additionally, we thank Bruce Hibbard for use of the rainout shelters, and Tim Praisewater, Mel Oliver, and Jim Elder for training and equipment use. We also thank Joe LaRose, Harper Smith, Katie LaPlante, Tanner Adkins, Kelsey Benthall, Kristin Tosie, and Mason Ward for their help preparing the field site, sampling, and processing data.
Funding
This project was supported by the University of Missouri Research Board and USDA NIFA MO-HAPS0006. Additionally, this work was supported by AFRI EWD (2019–67011-29729) from the USDA National Institute of Food and Agriculture.
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JK and DF formulated the study and designed experiments. JK performed experiments. DC provided assistance with statistical analysis. JK and DF wrote the manuscript with insight from DC.
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Communicated by Colin Mark Orians.
Plant water stress affects the whole community, but different trophic groups are responding to different bottom-up traits.
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Kansman, J.T., Crowder, D.W. & Finke, D.L. Primacy of plants in driving the response of arthropod communities to drought. Oecologia 195, 833–842 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00442-020-04844-0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00442-020-04844-0