The influence of warming on the biogeographic and phylogenetic dependence of herbivore–plant interactions

Abstract

Evolutionary experience and the phylogenetic relationships of plants have both been proposed to influence herbivore–plant interactions and plant invasion success. However, the direction and magnitude of these effects, and how such patterns are altered with increasing temperature, are rarely studied. Through laboratory functional response experiments, we tested whether the per capita feeding efficiency of an invasive generalist herbivore, the golden apple snail, Pomacea canaliculata , is dependent on the biogeographic origin and phylogenetic relatedness of host plants, and how increasing temperature alters these dependencies. The feeding efficiency of the herbivore was highest on plant species with which it had no shared evolutionary history, that is, novel plants. Further, among evolutionarily familiar plants, snail feeding efficiency was higher on those species more closely related to the novel plants. However, these biogeographic dependencies became less pronounced with increasing temperature, whereas the phylogenetic dependence was unaffected. Collectively, our findings indicate that the susceptibility of plants to this invasive herbivore is mediated by both biogeographic origin and phylogenetic relatedness. We hypothesize that warming erodes the influence of evolutionary exposure, thereby altering herbivore–plant interactions and perhaps the invasion success of plants.

Functional Response and Intraspecific Competition in the Fall Armyworm, Spodoptera frugiperda (Lepidoptera: Noctuidae)

“…This can be predicted by Holling’s disc model. Similar studies on other species of herbivore have also indicated the suitability of Holling’s disc model for describing the feeding behaviors [ 42 , 43 , 44 ].…”

Gimme Shelter: differential utilisation and propagule creation of invasive macrophytes by native caddisfly larvae

“…Functional responses and associated resource preferences/switching have been identified as powerful tools to quantify invasive species impacts and invasion success (Dick et al 2014;Cuthbert et al 2018b;Skein et al 2018), whereby Type II curves are thought to be resource destabilising due to high resource utilisation rates at low densities, whilst the converse is true for Type III FRs. However, whilst FRs are commonly applied to address consumer-resource interactions such as predation and herbivory (Dick et al 2014;Xu et al 2016a, b;Mu et al 2018;Cuthbert et al 2018a), there has hitherto been a lack of consideration for such per capita effects in shredder-herbivores, especially with regards to atypical resource utilisation behaviours, such as caddisfly case-building.…”