Incorporation of an invasive plant into a native insect herbivore food web

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 di...

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Published inPeerJ preprints
Main Authors Schilthuizen, Menno, Santos Pimenta, Lúcia P, Lammers, Youri, Steenbergen, Peter J, Flohil, Marco, Beveridge, Nils GP, VanDuijn, Pieter T, Meulblok, Marjolein M, Sosef, Nils, Robin Vande Ven, Werring, Ralf, Beentjes, Kevin K, Meijer, Kim, Vos, Rutger A, Vrieling, Klaas, Gravendeel, Barbara, Choi, Young, Verpoorte, Robert, Smit, Chris, Beukeboom, Leo W
Format Journal Article
LanguageEnglish
Published San Diego PeerJ, Inc 26.03.2016
Subjects
Food chains
Food plants
Food webs
Glycosides
Gonioctena quinquepunctata
Herbivores
Herbivory
Host preferences
Introduced species
Invasive plants
Invasive species
Invasiveness
Prognosis
Prunus padus
Prunus serotina
Single-nucleotide polymorphism
Sorbus aucuparia
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Summary: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.
ISSN:2167-9843
DOI:10.7287/peerj.preprints.1899v1