Abstract
Because the diet of many herbivorous insects is restricted to closely related taxa with similar chemistry, intercropping with diverse plant communities may reduce both pest populations and reliance on chemical pesticides in agroecosystems. We tested whether the effectiveness of intercropping against herbivorous insects depends on the phylogenetic relatedness of neighboring crops, using butternut squash (Cucurbita moschata) as a focal crop species in a series of different intercropping combinations. We found that increased phylogenetic divergence of neighboring plants could reduce abundance of herbivorous insects, but the effect was only detectable mid-season. In addition, we tested two hypothesized mechanisms for a negative association between phylogenetic distance of neighboring plants and reduced herbivore populations: one, we tested using Y-tube olfactometer and choice cage trials whether diverse volatile cues impede host-plant location by the dominant pest of butternut squash in our experiment, striped cucumber beetle Acalymma vittatum. Two, we recorded predator and parasitoid abundance relative to crop phylodiversity to test whether diverse crops support larger natural-enemy populations that can better control pest species. Our results, however, did not support either hypothesis. Striped cucumber beetles preferentially oriented toward non-host-plant volatiles, and predator populations more often decreased with phylodiversity than increased. Thus, the mechanisms driving associations in the field between phylogenetic divergence and herbivore populations remain unclear.
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The datasets used and/or analyzed during the current study are available at Penn State’s Data Commons. DOI: https://doi.org/10.26208/fw9t-1130.
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Acknowledgements
We thank E. Rowen, K. Pearsons, S. McTish, J. Baniszewski, J. Golinski, and A. Aschwanden for advice and feedback, as well as for help in data collection and experimental setup. We also thank our undergraduate assistants for help with data collection and sample sorting: D. Wisniewski, K. Kim, K. Koepplinger, G. Reiter, H. Bock, J. Halterman, K. Hoerr, B. Wilt, S. Klein, and A. Seow. S. Fleischer and B. Gugino provided additional advice and refinement of the study design and comments on an early version of this manuscript. We thank K. Ingerslew (Purdue University) and N. Emery (University of Colorado) for their help with phylogenetic relationships among crop species. We also thank C. Dillon and A. Kirt for help with farm management and advice and D. Roberts for advice about common pests of cucurbit systems. Finally, we thank the two anonymous reviewers and Editor Riccardo Bommarco for their thoughtful suggestions on improving the manuscript.
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This project was supported by the United States Department of Agriculture National Institute of Food and Agriculture, grant # 2017-67013-26255 and the College of Agricultural Sciences at Penn State via the National Institute of Food and Agriculture and Hatch Appropriations under Project #PEN04606 and Accession #1009362.
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JFT and IK secured funding for the project and helped conceive and design the experiments along with AMC and ECY. AMC and ECY performed the experiments and analyzed the data. AMC, ECY, IK, and JFT all contributed to writing and editing the manuscript.
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Communicated by Riccardo Bommarco.
Open Research Statement: Data are now archived at DOI: https://doi.org/10.26208/fw9t-1130.
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Coco, A.M., Yip, E.C., Kaplan, I. et al. More phylogenetically diverse polycultures inconsistently suppress insect herbivore populations. Oecologia 198, 1057–1072 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00442-022-05153-4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00442-022-05153-4