Traumatized Hosts: Their Influence on the Population Dynamics of the Southern Pine Bark Beetle Guild

Abstract

There is considerable interest worldwide in understanding the interactions between plants and insects. Typically, studies focus on the interactions of individual plants and insects and then extrapolate to the population level. This extrapolation may be misleading because studies at the level of the individual necessarily simplify and overlook many abiotic and biotic factors of the environment which affect population-level performance. Therefore, population-level predictions formed from studies at the individual level may differ substantially from actual observations made at the population level. In this chapter, we study host/insect interactions directly at the population level. We compare parameters of bark beetle population dynamics in traumatized trees (host defenses presumed to be largely removed) and in naturally infested pines (defenses presumed to be relatively intact) to examine the role of disturbed trees in the epidemiology of the southern pine bark beetle guild. Specifically, we consider (1) arrival densities, (2) attack densities, (3) colonization distributions, (4) emergence densities, (5) oviposition, (6) brood production, and (7) survivorship of bark beetles.