Incorporation of an invasive plant into a native insect herbivore food web
- Published
- Accepted
- Subject Areas
- Ecology, Entomology, Environmental Sciences, Evolutionary Studies, Plant Science
- Keywords
- adaptation, Exotic plants, insect herbivores, Prunus serotina, secondary metabolites
- Copyright
- © 2016 Schilthuizen et al.
- Licence
- This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, reproduction and adaptation in any medium and for any purpose provided that it is properly attributed. For attribution, the original author(s), title, publication source (PeerJ Preprints) and either DOI or URL of the article must be cited.
- Cite this article
- 2016. Incorporation of an invasive plant into a native insect herbivore food web. PeerJ Preprints 4:e1899v1 https://doi.org/10.7287/peerj.preprints.1899v1
Abstract
The integration of invasive species into native food webs represent multifarious dynamics of ecological and evolutionary processes. We document incorporation of Prunus serotina (black cherry) into native insect food webs. We find that P. serotina harbours a herbivore community less dense but more diverse than its native relative, P. padus (bird cherry), with similar proportions of specialists and generalists. While herbivory on P. padus remained stable over the past century, that on P. serotina gradually doubled. We show that P. serotina may have evolved changes in investment in cyanogenic glycosides compared with its native range. In the leaf beetle Gonioctena quinquepunctata, recently shifted from native Sorbus aucuparia to P. serotina, we find divergent host preferences on Sorbus- versus Prunus-derived populations, and weak host-specific differentiation among 380 individuals genotyped for 119 SNP loci. We conclude that evolutionary processes may generate a specialized herbivore community on an invasive plant, allowing prognoses of reduced invasiveness over time. On the basis of the results presented here, we would like to caution that manual control might have the adverse effect of a slowing down of processes of adaptation, and a delay in the decline of the invasive character of P. serotina.
Author Comment
This is a submission to PeerJ for review.
Supplemental Information
SI Text S1
Structure analysis and AMOVA on SNP data for Gonioctena quinquepunctata.
SI Text S2
Calculations of conversion of cyanogenic glycoside contents for dry and fresh weight leaves.
Table S1
Full data on identities and numbers of herbivores collected on each individual Prunus serotina and Prunus padus in National Park Zuid-Kennemerland.
Table S2
Information on insect herbivore damage in historical collection specimens from the National Herbarium, Leiden, for Prunus serotina and Prunus padus.
Table S3
Full data on NMR analysis of Prunus leaves.
Table S4
SNP genotype data on Gonioctena quinquepunctata.
Table S5
Oligonucleotides used for the SNP-analysis of Gonioctena quinquepunctata.
Table S6
SNP Loci that showed indications of genetic differentiation between both host plants in the leaf beetle Gonioctena quinquepunctata.
Table S7
ANOVA and GLM results for the Gonioctena quinquepunctata host preference tests.
Table S8
Explanatory variables and response variables for the test of parasitzation of caterpillars on P. serotina and P. padus.