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Modeling nitrogen flux by larval insect herbivores from a temperate hardwood forest

  • Ecophysiology
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Abstract

Herbivorous insects flux considerable amounts of nitrogen from the forest canopy to the soil in the form of frass. The amount of nitrogen fluxed varies depending on the characteristics of the herbivores, their food resources, and their physical environment. We used concepts from metabolic ecology and ecological stoichiometry to develop a general model of individual nitrogen flux via frass fall for moth and sawfly larvae from a temperate hardwood forest in northern Wisconsin, USA. We found that individual nitrogen flux (Q N, mg N/day) was related to larval body mass (M B, mg dry), short-term variation in environmental temperature (T, K), and larval nitrogen concentration (N B, proportion dry mass) as Q N = e25.75 M 0.77B  e−0.83/kT N −1.56B , where k is Boltzmann’s constant (8.62 × 10−5 eV/K). We also found that larval nitrogen flux did not vary with the nitrogen concentration of food, and suggest that this was due to compensatory feeding by larvae living on low-quality leaves. With further work, models of individual N flux could be used to scale individual fluxes to population and community levels, and thus link the characteristics of insect herbivore communities with the flow of nitrogen through forested ecosystems.

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Acknowledgments

Thanks to Mike Hillstrom and Phil Pellitteri for assistance with larval identification; Julie Doll, John Albright, and John Craig for assistance with nitrogen analyses; and Adam Gusse and Andy Vogelzang for help with tussock moth rearing. Thanks to Chris Frost and three anonymous reviewers for their thoughtful comments on previous versions of this manuscript. This project was partially funded by the Office of Science (Biological and Environmental Research) of the US Department of Energy under award numbers DE-FG02-05ER64112 and DE-FG02-06ER64232.

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  1. Department of Entomology, University of Wisconsin, 1630 Linden Drive, Madison, WI, 53706, USA

    Timothy D. Meehan & Richard L. Lindroth

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  1. Timothy D. Meehan
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  2. Richard L. Lindroth
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Correspondence to Timothy D. Meehan.

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Communicated by Richard Karban.

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Meehan, T.D., Lindroth, R.L. Modeling nitrogen flux by larval insect herbivores from a temperate hardwood forest. Oecologia 153, 833–843 (2007). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00442-007-0797-9

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