ROLES OF FOOD QUALITY AND ENEMY-FREE SPACE IN HOST USE BY A GENERALIST INSECT HERBIVORE
By Michael S. Singer, D. Rodrigues, John O Stireman Iii, Y. Carrière. 2004
153 citations recorded by the source corpus.
The relative importance of food quality vs. enemy-free space remains an unresolved but central issue in the evolutionary ecology of host use by phytophagous insects. In this study, we investigate their relative importance in determining host-plant use by a generalist caterpillar, Estigmene acrea (Lepidoptera: Arctiidae). In nature, E. acrea late- instar caterpillars preferred Senecio longilobus (Asteraceae), which contains pyrrolizidine alkaloids that the caterpillars sequester, over Viguiera dentata (Asteraceae), a natal host, and typically suffered a 28% mortality risk from parasitoids. We hypothesized that the natural, mixed diet of caterpillars provides high-quality food via hosts like Viguiera as well as antiparasitoid defense via sequestered toxins from Senecio. We found that a pure Viguiera diet provides superior growth performance over a pure Senecio or mixed diet in the absence of parasitism. However, when parasitism risk is at least moderate, the mixed diet provides a survival advantage over the pure diets of Viguiera or Senecio. We therefore conclude that the balance between benefits of growth (food quality) and defense (enemy-free space) maintains the use of a mixed diet in nature. Furthermore, the value of enemy-free space supercedes the value of food quality in determining the host-plant preference of late-instar caterpillars.
Subfields: Insect Science, Plant Science
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/bd826cbcb28f63d771465df2073516f9c6b2ad3c
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Citations in the corpus
- The tri-trophic niche concept and adaptive radiation of phytophagous insects (2005, background): “…1994), defence types and diet breadth (Dyer 1995, 1997; Dyer & Gentry 1999; Gentry & Dyer 2002; Ferrari & Godfray 2003; Stireman & Singer 2003), phenology (Le Corff et al. 2000), and host identity as it relates to feeding preference (Barbosa et al. 2001; Lill et al. 2002; Singer et al. 2004).”