scholarly journals Predicting patch occupancy reveals the complexity of host range expansion

2020 ◽  
Vol 6 (48) ◽  
pp. eabc6852
Author(s):  
M. L. Forister ◽  
C. S. Philbin ◽  
Z. H. Marion ◽  
C. A. Buerkle ◽  
C. D. Dodson ◽  
...  

Specialized plant-insect interactions are a defining feature of life on earth, yet we are only beginning to understand the factors that set limits on host ranges in herbivorous insects. To better understand the recent adoption of alfalfa as a host plant by the Melissa blue butterfly, we quantified arthropod assemblages and plant metabolites across a wide geographic region while controlling for climate and dispersal inferred from population genomic variation. The presence of the butterfly is successfully predicted by direct and indirect effects of plant traits and interactions with other species. Results are consistent with the predictions of a theoretical model of parasite host range in which specialization is an epiphenomenon of the many barriers to be overcome rather than a consequence of trade-offs in developmental physiology.

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
M. L. Forister ◽  
C. S. Philbin ◽  
Z. H. Marion ◽  
C. A. Buerkle ◽  
C. D. Dodson ◽  
...  

AbstractSpecialized plant-insect interactions are a defining feature of life on earth, yet we are only beginning to understand the factors that set limits on host ranges in herbivorous insects. To understand the colonization of alfalfa by the Melissa blue butterfly, we quantified arthropod assemblages and plant metabolites across a wide geographic region, while controlling for climate and dispersal inferred from population genomic variation. The presence of the butterfly is successfully predicted by direct and indirect effects of plant traits and interactions with other species. Results are consistent with the predictions of a theoretical model of parasite host range in which specialization is an epiphenomenon of the many barriers to be overcome rather than a consequence of trade-offs in developmental physiology.One sentence summaryThe formation of a novel plant-insect interaction can be predicted with a combination of biotic and abiotic factors, with comparable importance revealed for metabolomic variation in plants and interactions with mutualists, competitors and enemies.


Evolution ◽  
2016 ◽  
Vol 70 (6) ◽  
pp. 1249-1264 ◽  
Author(s):  
Zachariah Gompert ◽  
Frank J. Messina

Metabolites ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 11 (3) ◽  
pp. 134
Author(s):  
Marília Elias Gallon ◽  
Leonardo Gobbo-Neto

Balanced nutritional intake is essential to ensure that insects undergo adequate larval development and metamorphosis. Integrative multidisciplinary approaches have contributed valuable insights regarding the ecological and evolutionary outcomes of plant–insect interactions. To address the plant metabolites involved in the larval development of a specialist insect, we investigated the development of Chlosyne lacinia caterpillars fed on Heliantheae species (Tithonia diversifolia, Tridax procumbens and Aldama robusta) leaves and determined the chemical profile of plants and insects using a metabolomic approach. By means of LC-MS and GC-MS combined analyses, 51 metabolites were putatively identified in Heliantheae species and C. lacinia caterpillars and frass; these metabolites included flavonoids, sesquiterpene lactones, monoterpenoids, sesquiterpenoids, diterpenes, triterpenes, oxygenated terpene derivatives, steroids and lipid derivatives. The leading discriminant metabolites were diterpenes, which were detected only in A. robusta leaves and insects that were fed on this plant-based diet. Additionally, caterpillars fed on A. robusta leaves took longer to complete their development to the adult phase and exhibited a greater diapause rate. Hence, we hypothesized that diterpenes may be involved in the differential larval development. Our findings shed light on the plant metabolites that play roles in insect development and metabolism, opening new research avenues for integrative studies of insect nutritional ecology.


2007 ◽  
Vol 13 ◽  
pp. 107-110
Author(s):  
M. Omacini ◽  
E.J. Chaneton ◽  
C.M. Ghersa

There is a growing recognition that endophyte effects on host plant traits may be propagated through food chains. We studied Neotyphodium occultans effects on soil nematode communities mediated by current and past patch occupancy by endophyteinfected Lolium multiflorum populations. A microcosm experiment was performed to evaluate whether abundance and diversity of nematodes at different trophic levels were affected by endophyte infection through rhizosphere-mediated or littermediated effects. We found that presence of endophyte-infected plants and their aerial litter both triggered a bottom-up trophic cascade enhancing the abundance of herbivorous and predaceous nematode taxa. Endophyte infection also increased overall nematode richness, mostly through changes induced at the highest trophic level in this soil food web. Our results suggest that fungal endophytes can modify the linkages between aboveand belowground community compartments, with potential consequences on plant patch dynamics. Keywords: soil food webs, Lolium multiflorum, Neotyphodium occultans, plant-soil feedback, after-life effects, indirect interactions, trophic cascades


1996 ◽  
Vol 70 (2) ◽  
pp. 280-293 ◽  
Author(s):  
Desmond Collins

The remarkable “evolution” of the reconstructions of Anomalocaris, the extraordinary predator from the 515 million year old Middle Cambrian Burgess Shale of British Columbia, reflects the dramatic changes in our interpretation of early animal life on Earth over the past 100 years. Beginning in 1892 with a claw identified as the abdomen and tail of a phyllocarid crustacean, parts of Anomalocaris have been described variously as a jellyfish, a sea-cucumber, a polychaete worm, a composite of a jellyfish and sponge, or have been attached to other arthropods as appendages. Charles D. Walcott collected complete specimens of Anomalocaris nathorsti between 1911 and 1917, and a Geological Survey of Canada party collected an almost complete specimen of Anomalocaris canadensis in 1966 or 1967, but neither species was adequately described until 1985. At that time they were interpreted by Whittington and Briggs to be representatives of “a hitherto unknown phylum.”Here, using recently collected specimens, the two species are newly reconstructed and described in the genera Anomalocaris and Laggania, and interpreted to be members of an extinct arthropod class, Dinocarida, and order Radiodonta, new to science. The long history of inaccurate reconstruction and mistaken identification of Anomalocaris and Laggania exemplifies our great difficulty in visualizing and classifying, from fossil remains, the many Cambrian animals with no apparent living descendants.


2021 ◽  
pp. 109-129
Author(s):  
Calla Hummel

Chapter 5 develops an ethnography of street vendors, their organizations, and the city officials who they interact with in the city of La Paz, Bolivia. The chapter is based on 14 months of ethnographic fieldwork in the city over four research trips in 2012, 2014 to 2015, 2018, and 2019 as well as administrative data on 31,906 street vending licenses in the city. Fieldwork included interviews, participant observation at dozens of meetings between bureaucrats and organized vendors, ride-alongs with the Municipal Guard, a street vendor survey, working as a street vendor in a clothing market, and selling wedding services with a street vendor cooperative. The theory’s observable implications are illustrated with ethnographic evidence, survey results, and license data from La Paz. I discuss how street vending has changed in the city and how officials have intervened in collective action decisions as the informal sector grew. The chapter demonstrates that officials increased benefits to organized vendors as the costs of regulating markets increased. Additionally, the leaders that take advantage of these offers tend to have more resources than their colleagues, and as the offers increased, so did the level of organization among the city’s street vendors. The chapter also discusses the many trade-offs that officials make in implementing different policies, and how officials manage the often combative organizations that they encourage.


Author(s):  
Robert S. Friedman ◽  
Desiree M. Roberts ◽  
Jonathan D. Linton

The articles addressed in this chapter on new product development can be classified in two general categories—papers that address the internal processes that assist or hinder development, and those that focus on factors that contribute to a new product’s success or failure in terms of performance and diffusion. We begin with Cooper and Kleinschmidt (1986), who report on the second phase of the New Prod project. Its goal was to examine the nature of the steps that affect the development process and determine how the step-wise structure was modified by the developer companies in order to improve process performance. Clark (1989) looks at project scope, or the extent to which in-house part development affects new product development and overall project performance. The new product development process, as a comprehensive scope of work, is the subject of Millison, Raj, and Wilemon’s (1992) discussion, specifically what the tensions and trade-offs are that occur among different functional areas and how they affect innovative product development. Wheelwright and Clark (1992) provide insight into strategies to plan, focus, and control a firm’s project development, offering an aggregate project plan that promotes management clearly delineating the roles and steps of each participant’s activities. Griffin and Page (1993) offer a practitioner’s framework that identifies and coordinates the many measures of product development success and failure, and holds them up against existing measures used by academic researchers. We then move to Souder’s (1988) article examining the relationship between R&D groups and marketing groups, the nature of the problems between them, and the structure of potentially effective partnerships.


2007 ◽  
Vol 85 (2) ◽  
pp. 160-166 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kari Lehtilä ◽  
Kristina Holmén Bränn

The evolution of flower size may be constrained by trade-offs between flower size and other plant traits. The aim of this study was to determine how selection on flower size affects both reproductive and vegetative traits. Raphanus raphanistrum L. was used as the study species. Artificial selection for small and large petal size was carried out for two generations. We measured the realized heritability of flower size and recorded flower production, time to flowering, plant size, and seed production in the two selection lines. The realized heritability was h2 = 0.49. Our study, therefore, showed that R. raphanistrum has potential for rapid evolutionary change of floral size. The lines with large flowers produced smaller seeds and started to flower later than the lines with small flowers. There was no trade-off between flower size and flower number, but the lines selected for large flower size had more flowers and a larger plant size than lines selected for small flowers. Estimates of restricted maximum likelihood (REML) analysis of pedigrees also showed that flower size had a positive genetic correlation with start of flowering and plant height.


2007 ◽  
Vol 139 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-44 ◽  
Author(s):  
H.V. Danks

AbstractThe many components of seasonal adaptations in insects are reviewed, especially from the viewpoint of aspects that must be studied in order to understand the structure and purposes of the adaptations. Component responses include dispersal, habitat selection, habitat modification, resistance to cold, dryness, and food limitation, trade-offs, diapause, modifications of developmental rate, sensitivity to environmental signals, life-cycle patterns including multiple alternatives in one species, and types of variation in phenology and development. Spatial, temporal, and resource elements of the environment are also reviewed, as are environmental signals, supporting the conclusion that further understanding of all of these seasonal responses requires detailed simultaneous study of the natural environments that drive the patterns of response.


Behaviour ◽  
2011 ◽  
Vol 148 (2) ◽  
pp. 131-189 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  

AbstractCarotenoids are among the most prevalent pigments used in animal signals and are also important for a range of physiological functions. These concomitant roles have made carotenoidbased signals a popular topic in behavioural ecology while also causing confusion and controversy. After a thorough background, we review the many pitfalls, caveats and seemingly contradictory conclusions that can result from not fully appreciating the complex nature of carotenoid function. Current controversies may be resolved through a more careful regard of this complexity, and of the immense taxonomic variability of carotenoid metabolism. Studies investigating the physiological trade-offs between ornamental and physiological uses of carotenoids have yielded inconsistent results. However, in many studies, homeostatic regulation of immune and antioxidant systems may have obscured the effects of carotenoid supplementation. We highlight how carefully designed experiments can overcome such complications. There is also a need to investigate factors other than physiological trade-offs (such as predation risk and social interactions) as these, too, may shape the expression of carotenoidbased signals. Moreover, the processes limiting signal expression individuals are likely different from those operating over evolutionary time-scales. Future research should give greater attention to carotenoid pigmentation outside the area of sexual selection, and to taxa other than fishes and birds.


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