The Pattern of Spread of Invading Species: Two Leaf-Mining Moths Colonizing Great Britain

Abstract

JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.. British Ecological Society is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Journal of Animal Ecology. Summary 1. Two leaf-mining moths in the genus Phyllonorycter colonized Great Britain in the mid-1980s, both feeding on introduced garden and amenity plants: P. leucographella on Pyracantha spp., and P. platani on Platanus spp. 2. Systematic surveys of the distribution and spread of the two species were carried out spanning a period of 5 and 3 years. The effect of humans in dispersing the two moths was also studied. 3. The relationship between the square root of the range and time was in both cases remarkably linear, suggesting that the spread of the moths can be viewed as a simple travelling wave. The velocity of this wave was 10-3 km year-' for P. leucographella and 8-6 km year-' for P. platani. 4. There were slight deviations from the predicted pattern of spread as a series of concentric circles. For P. leucographella these are partially explained by variations in urbanization, which is correlated with the density of host plants. 5. Several foci of colonization outside the main range were detected, due to human activities. There was also evidence of artificial spread in the vicinity of the main advance, but this was not sufficient to obscure the simple pattern detected.

Ecological Invasion, Roughened Fronts, and a Competitor’s Extreme Advance: Integrating Stochastic Spatial-Growth Models

“…As estimated dispersal distances of individuals increase (Andow et al, 1990;Bjornstad et al, 2002), diffusion limitation relaxes, and a reaction-diffusion dynamics may approximate spatial advance reasonably well, at both the within-habitat (Dwyer, 1992;Frantzen and van den Bosch, 2000) and between-habitat (van den Bosch et al, 1992;Nash et al, 1995) scales. Deterministic reaction-diffusion models, as noted above, predict pulled fronts advancing at a constant asymptotic velocity.…”

The global spread of Harmonia axyridis (Coleoptera: Coccinellidae): distribution, dispersal and routes of invasion

“…''stratified dispersal'') may be a common feature of invasions, and has already been described in several invasive insects, e.g. Phyllonorycter leucographella (Zeller) (Lepidoptera: Gracillariidae) (Nash et al 1995), Lymantria dispar L. (Lepidoptera: Lymantriidae) (Sharov and Liebhold 1998), Dendroctonus micans (Kug.) (Coleoptera: Scolytidae) (Gilbert et al 2003), Cameraria ohridella Deschka and Dimič (Lepidoptera: Gracillariidae) (Gilbert et al 2004) and see Lawson Handley et al (2011) for a review.…”

The Success of the Horse-Chestnut Leaf-Miner, Cameraria ohridella, in the UK Revealed with Hypothesis-Led Citizen Science

“…S1). If targeted search effort had continued we would have expected a more consistent range-filling spread of the moth, as has occurred with other range-expanding leaf-mining moths on non-native plants in Britain [25]. We anticipated that under-recording would occur as C. ohridella became established because the search area becomes larger and national interest in the species is reduced (the species is becoming ubiquitous, rather than being novel).…”