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Herbivore population dynamics in response to plant allocation strategies

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Abstract

When herbivores feed, plants may respond by altering the quantity of edible biomass available to future feeders through mechanisms such as compensatory regrowth of edible structures or allocation of biomass to inedible reserves. Previous work showed that some forms of compensatory regrowth can drive insect outbreaks, but this work assumed regrowth occurred without any energetic cost to the plant. While this is a useful simplifying assumption for gaining preliminary insights, plants face an inherent trade-off between allocating energy to regrowth versus storage. Therefore, we cannot truly understand the role of compensatory regrowth in driving insect outbreaks without continuing on to more realistic scenarios. In this paper, we model the interaction between insect herbivores and plants that have a trade-off between compensatory regrowth and allocation to inedible reserves in response to herbivory. We found that the plant’s allocation strategy, described in our model by parameters representing the strength of the overcompensatory response and the rates at which energy is stored and mobilized for growth, strongly affects whether herbivore outbreaks occur. Additional factors, such as the strength of food limitation and herbivore interference while feeding, influence the frequency of the outbreaks. Overall, we found a possible new role of overcompensation to promote herbivore fluctuations when it co-occurs with allocation to inedible reserves. We highlight the importance of considering trade-offs between tolerance mechanisms that plants use in response to herbivory by showing that new dynamics arise when different plant allocation strategies occur simultaneously.

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Data availability

There were no data collected for this study.

Code availability

Code is available at https://github.com/fang-ji/modeling_projects/tree/main/insect_outbreaks.

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Acknowledgements

We thank Annika Weder, Amy Patterson, Samantha Catella, Angela Lenard, Hilary Rollins, Robin Snyder, and Jean Burns for their valuable comments on this manuscript. All authors were partially supported by McDonnell Foundation Complex Systems Scholar grant #220020364. Fang Ji and Karen Abbott received additional support from National Science Foundation DMS-1840221.

Funding

All authors were partially supported by McDonnell Foundation Complex Systems Scholar grant #220020364. Fang Ji and Karen Abbott received additional support from NSF DMS-1840221.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Biology, Case Western Reserve University, 10900 Euclid Avenue, Cleveland, OH, 44106, USA

    Fang Ji, Christopher R. Stieha & Karen C. Abbott

  2. Department of Biology, Millersville University, Millersville, PA, USA

    Christopher R. Stieha

Authors
  1. Fang Ji
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  2. Christopher R. Stieha
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  3. Karen C. Abbott
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Contributions

Karen Abbott, Christopher Stieha, and Fang Ji conceived the ideas and designed methodology; Fang Ji and Christopher Stieha constructed the model; Fang Ji analyzed the model; Fang Ji and Karen Abbott 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 Fang Ji.

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The authors have no relevant financial or non-financial interests to disclose.

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Ji, F., Stieha, C.R. & Abbott, K.C. Herbivore population dynamics in response to plant allocation strategies. Theor Ecol 15, 191–202 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12080-022-00536-y

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