Fine-scale plant defence variability increases top-down control of an herbivore

Ryan Paul; Ian S. Pearse; Paul J. Ode

doi:10.1111/1365-2435.13808

Home/Archive/USGS

USGS · 70226192

Fine-scale plant defence variability increases top-down control of an herbivore

Ryan Paul·Ian S. Pearse·Paul J. Ode

View original source ↗Export metadata ↓

Abstract

Herbivore populations are regulated by a combination of plant defences and natural enemies. While plant defence can suppress herbivore populations, these defences can also adversely affect natural enemies, thereby releasing herbivores from top-down control. Over their life spans, herbivores and their natural enemies may experience substantial variation in plant defence. Recent studies have demonstrated that individual herbivores feeding on diets containing variable concentrations of plant toxins suffer substantially reduced fitness compared to herbivores feeding on a constant toxin concentration, even when both groups of herbivores experience equivalent means. However, the impacts of defence variability on natural enemies and top-down control of herbivores are unknown. Using artificial diets, we independently manipulated the mean concentration and variation of a plant toxin experienced by individual Trichoplusia ni caterpillars and its parasitoid Copidosoma floridanum . Additionally, by combining the performance of individual caterpillars on different constant diet concentrations of toxin, we were able to estimate the effect of toxin variability between herbivores using nonlinear averaging. Increases in the mean toxin concentration in the diet of parasitized T. ni hosts decreased the fitness of C. floridanum , while variance in individual diets did not impact parasitoid fitness, even though both mean and variance decreased the fitness of T. ni caterpillars. Increased variability in encountered plant defences suppressed individual herbivore fitness with no perceptible cost to top-down control. At the population level, however, increased variability between individual herbivore diets decreased the success of parasitoids relative to herbivores, thus reducing the strength of top-down control. Our study highlights the importance of defence variability at different scales in regulating herbivore performance. Variability in plant defence has the potential to reduce herbivore populations through a combination of bottom-up and top-down effects, but only at small spatial scales experienced by individual herbivores.

Explore related subjects

Functional Ecology Article

Keep this discovery

Explore connections, maps & timelines

BibTeX RIS

Ryan Paul, Ian S. Pearse, Paul J. Ode. 2021-05-31. Fine-scale plant defence variability increases top-down control of an herbivore. https://doi.org/10.1111/1365-2435.13808

Cite the original work for its findings. Save a collection to share your selection of sources.

KEEP EXPLORING

Related USGS reports

USGS2026

Functional traits can explain coordinated seedling responses to drought and freezing stress

Limited plant establishment creates demographic bottlenecks that can alter vegetation trajectories in changing environments, yet it is unclear how common eco-evolutionary indicators of plant strategy shape early response to key stressors. We evaluated how early functional traits, phylogeny, and adult climate niche jointly explain seedling drought and freezing tolerance across 49 semi-arid rangeland species. The best models explained 36% of variation in freezing tolerance (traits only) and 45% of variation in drought tolerance (traits, phylogeny, and climate), identifying both shared and unique indicators of different stress responses. Drought tolerance was explained by rapid root elongation and large seed size, while phylogeny captured additional tolerance within the grass family. Seedling freezing tolerance was linked to rapid root elongation and colder thresholds for root growth, though traits shared some explanatory power with adult climate niche (cold temperature distribution). While stress resistance can be shaped by phylogeny and adaptations to long-term climate regimes, our results elucidate early traits with clearer direct links to establishment capacity under drought and freezing stress, across species. Additional research is needed to understand how variation in stress response strategies across multiple demographic stages (e.g., seeds, seedlings, mature plant) and ecological scales (e.g., within and across species' climate distributions) could affect vegetation distributions and trajectories in changing environments.

Colorado Plateau, Great Basin, western United Stat↗

USGS2025

Shared leadership can promote success in collaborative research networks in ecology

1. While collaborative science is becoming the norm in ecology, many ecologists participating in collaborations are less aware of the body of research that studies the processes by which collaborative teams organize and communicate. 2. Here, we discuss how we successfully used a shared leadership model in the Dry Rivers Research Coordination Network. We discuss how this model promote dour success in different stages of the project, using the Tuckman model of team development: forming, storming, norming, performing and adjourning. 3. Shared leadership in the forming phase helped us recruit a diverse membership from different scientific disciplines. In the storming and norming phases, shared leadership was especially useful in ensuring that all voices were heard in establishing group norms that promoted adhesion among and investment by RCN members. Shared leadership in the performing phase was crucial in providing opportunities for early career members to lead projects, and in the adjourning phase we reflected upon our entire collaboration to identify that shared leadership was crucial to our success, generating the thesis for this commentary. 4. It is our hope that others may find this discussion of our experience in implementing a shared leadership model useful in developing their own fruitful collaborations.

Functional Ecology↗

USGS2025

Ecological acclimation: A framework to integrate fast and slow responses to climate change

Ecological responses to climate change occur across vastly different time-scales, from minutes for physiological plasticity to decades or centuries for community turnover and evolutionary adaptation. Accurately predicting the range of ecosystem trajectories will require models that incorporate both fast processes that may keep pace with climate change and slower ones likely to lag behind and generate disequilibrium dynamics. However, the knowledge necessary for this integration is currently fragmented across disciplines. We develop ‘ecological acclimation’ as a unifying framework to emphasize the similarity of dynamics driven by processes operating on dramatically different time-scales and levels of biological organization. The framework focuses on ecoclimate sensitivities, measured as the change in an ecological response variable per unit of climate change. Acclimation processes acting at different time-scales cause these sensitivities to shift in magnitude and even direction over time. We highlight shifting ecoclimate sensitivities in case studies from diverse ecosystems, including terrestrial plant communities, coral reefs and soil microbiomes. Models predicting future ecosystem states inevitably make assumptions about acclimation processes; these assumptions must be explicit for users to evaluate whether a model is appropriate for a given forecast horizon. Similarly, decision frameworks that clearly account for multiple acclimation processes and their distinct time-scales will help natural resource managers plan for ecological impacts of climate change from years to many decades into the future. We outline a synthetic research programme focused on the time-scales of ecological acclimation to reduce uncertainty in ecological forecasts.

Functional Ecology↗