The Many Dimensions of Diet Breadth: Phytochemical, Genetic, Behavioral, and Physiological Perspectives on the Interaction between a Native Herbivore and an Exotic Host.

From the perspective of an herbivorous insect, conspecific host plants are not identical, and intraspecific variation in host nutritional quality or defensive capacity might mediate spatially variable outcomes in plant-insect interactions. Here we explore this possibility in the context of an ongoing host breadth expansion of a native butterfly (the Melissa blue, Lycaeides melissa) onto an exotic host plant (alfalfa, Medicago sativa). We examine variation among seven alfalfa populations that differed in terms of colonization by L. melissa; specifically, we examined variation in phytochemistry, foliar protein, and plant population genetic structure, as well as responses of caterpillars and adult butterflies to foliage from the same populations. Regional patterns of alfalfa colonization by L. melissa were well predicted by phytochemical variation, and colonized patches of alfalfa showed a similar level of inter-individual phytochemical diversity. However, phytochemical variation was a poor predictor of larval performance, despite the fact that survival and weight gain differed dramatically among caterpillars reared on plants from different alfalfa populations. Moreover, we observed a mismatch between alfalfa supporting the best larval performance and alfalfa favored by ovipositing females. Thus, the axes of plant variation that mediate interactions with L. melissa depend upon herbivore life history stage, which raises important issues for our understanding of adaptation to novel resources by an organism with a complex life history.

Species with more volatile population dynamics are differentially impacted by weather.

Climatic variation has been invoked as an explanation of population dynamics for a variety of taxa. Much work investigating the link between climatic forcings and population fluctuation uses single-taxon case studies. Here, we conduct comparative analyses of a multi-decadal dataset describing population dynamics of 50 co-occurring butterfly species at 10 sites in Northern California. Specifically, we explore the potential commonality of response to weather among species that encompass a gradient of population dynamics via a hierarchical Bayesian modelling framework. Results of this analysis demonstrate that certain weather conditions impact volatile, or irruptive, species differently as compared with relatively stable species. Notably, precipitation-related variables, including indices of the El Niño Southern Oscillation, have a more pronounced impact on the most volatile species. We hypothesize that these variables influence vegetation resource availability, and thus indirectly influence population dynamics of volatile taxa. As one of the first studies to show a common influence of weather among taxa with similar population dynamics, the results presented here suggest new lines of research in the field of biotic-abiotic interactions.