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Establishment and dominance of an introduced herbivore has limited impact on native host-parasitoid food webs

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Abstract

The gypsy moth is considered one of the most harmful invasive forest insects in North America. It has been suggested that gypsy moth may indirectly impact native caterpillar communities via shared parasitoids. However, the impact of gypsy moth on forest insect food webs in general remains unstudied. Here we assess such potential impacts by surveying forest insect food webs in Ontario, Canada. We systematically collected caterpillars using burlap bands at sites with and without histories of gypsy moth outbreak, and then reared these caterpillars until potential parasitoid emergence. This procedure allowed us to generate quantitative food webs describing caterpillar-parasitoid interactions. We estimated the degree of parasitoid sharing between gypsy moth and native caterpillars. We also statistically modeled the effect of gypsy moth outbreak history and current gypsy moth abundance on standard indices of quantitative food web structure and the diversity of parasitoid communities. Rates of gypsy moth parasitism were very low and gypsy moth shared very few parasitoids with native caterpillars, suggesting limited potential for indirect interactions. We did not detect any significant effects of gypsy moth on either food web structure or parasitoid diversity, and the small amount of parasitoid sharing strongly implies that this lack of significance is not merely due to low statistical power. Our study suggests that gypsy moth has limited impact on native host-parasitoid food webs, at least for species that use burlap bands. Our results emphasize that extrapolations of theoretical and experimental conclusions on the impacts of invasive species should be tested in natural settings.

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Acknowledgments

The authors thank J. Kaknevicius, D. Maguire, E. Ratsep, and a number of volunteers for their assistance in collections, rearing and specimen processing. We also thank V. Nealis, P. Kotanen, C. Darling, J. Malcolm, J. Elkinton and two anonymous referees for comments which improved the manuscript. We are grateful to A. Bennett, J. Fernandez Triana, G. Gibson, H. Goulet, J. Huber and J. O’Hara for assistance with parasitoid identification. This research was supported by a Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC) post-graduate scholarship to LLT and NSERC Biocontrol Network and Discovery Grants to SSM.

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  1. Faculty of Forestry, University of Toronto, 33 Willcocks Street, Toronto, ON, M5S 3B3, Canada

    Laura L. Timms & Sandy M. Smith

  2. Département de Sciences Biologiques, Université de Montréal, P.O. Box 6128, Station Centre-Ville, Montreal, QC, H3C 3J7, Canada

    Steven C. Walker

  3. Department of Natural Resource Sciences, McGill University, Macdonald Campus, 21,111 Lakeshore Road, Ste-Anne-de-Bellevue, Montreal, QC, H9X 3V9, Canada

    Laura L. Timms

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Correspondence to Laura L. Timms.

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Timms, L.L., Walker, S.C. & Smith, S.M. Establishment and dominance of an introduced herbivore has limited impact on native host-parasitoid food webs. Biol Invasions 14, 229–244 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10530-011-9999-5

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