Dataset Information

Insect responses to host plant provision beyond natural boundaries: latitudinal and altitudinal variation in a Chinese fig wasp community.

ABSTRACT: Many plants are grown outside their natural ranges. Plantings adjacent to native ranges provide an opportunity to monitor community assembly among associated insects and their parasitoids in novel environments, to determine whether gradients in species richness emerge and to examine their consequences for host plant reproductive success. We recorded the fig wasps (Chalcidoidea) associated with a single plant resource (ovules of Ficus microcarpa) along a 1200 km transect in southwest China that extended for 1000 km beyond the tree's natural northern range margin. The fig wasps included the tree's agaonid pollinator and other species that feed on the ovules or are their parasitoids. Phytophagous fig wasps (12 species) were more numerous than parasitoids (nine species). The proportion of figs occupied by fig wasps declined with increasing latitude, as did the proportion of utilized ovules in occupied figs. Species richness, diversity, and abundance of fig wasps also significantly changed along both latitudinal and altitudinal gradients. Parasitoids declined more steeply with latitude than phytophages. Seed production declined beyond the natural northern range margin, and at high elevation, because pollinator fig wasps became rare or absent. This suggests that pollinator climatic tolerances helped limit the tree's natural distribution, although competition with another species may have excluded pollinators at the highest altitude site. Isolation by distance may prevent colonization of northern sites by some fig wasps and act in combination with direct and host-mediated climatic effects to generate gradients in community composition, with parasitoids inherently more sensitive because of declines in the abundance of potential hosts.

SUBMITTER: Wang R

PROVIDER: S-EPMC4567868 | biostudies-literature | 2015 Sep

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature

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Insect responses to host plant provision beyond natural boundaries: latitudinal and altitudinal variation in a Chinese fig wasp community.

Wang Rong R Compton Stephen G SG Quinnell Rupert J RJ Peng Yan-Qiong YQ Barwell Louise L Chen Yan Y

Ecology and evolution 20150813 17

Many plants are grown outside their natural ranges. Plantings adjacent to native ranges provide an opportunity to monitor community assembly among associated insects and their parasitoids in novel environments, to determine whether gradients in species richness emerge and to examine their consequences for host plant reproductive success. We recorded the fig wasps (Chalcidoidea) associated with a single plant resource (ovules of Ficus microcarpa) along a 1200 km transect in southwest China that e ...[more]

PMID: 26380693

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Project description:Fig trees are pollinated by fig wasps, which also oviposit in female flowers. The wasp larvae gall and eat developing seeds. Although fig trees benefit from allowing wasps to oviposit, because the wasp offspring disperse pollen, figs must prevent wasps from ovipositing in all flowers, or seed production would cease, and the mutualism would go extinct. In Ficus racemosa, we find that syconia ('figs') that have few foundresses (ovipositing wasps) are underexploited in the summer (few seeds, few galls, many empty ovules) and are overexploited in the winter (few seeds, many galls, few empty ovules). Conversely, syconia with many foundresses produce intermediate numbers of galls and seeds, regardless of season. We use experiments to explain these patterns, and thus, to explain how this mutualism is maintained. In the hot summer, wasps suffer short lifespans and therefore fail to oviposit in many flowers. In contrast, cooler temperatures in the winter permit longer wasp lifespans, which in turn allows most flowers to be exploited by the wasps. However, even in winter, only in syconia that happen to have few foundresses are most flowers turned into galls. In syconia with higher numbers of foundresses, interference competition reduces foundress lifespans, which reduces the proportion of flowers that are galled. We further show that syconia encourage the entry of multiple foundresses by delaying ostiole closure. Taken together, these factors allow fig trees to reduce galling in the wasp-benign winter and boost galling (and pollination) in the wasp-stressing summer. Interference competition has been shown to reduce virulence in pathogenic bacteria. Our results show that interference also maintains cooperation in a classic, cooperative symbiosis, thus linking theories of virulence and mutualism. More generally, our results reveal how frequency-dependent population regulation can occur in the fig-wasp mutualism, and how a host species can 'set the rules of the game' to ensure mutualistic behavior in its symbionts.

Dataset Information

Insect responses to host plant provision beyond natural boundaries: latitudinal and altitudinal variation in a Chinese fig wasp community.

Publications

Insect responses to host plant provision beyond natural boundaries: latitudinal and altitudinal variation in a Chinese fig wasp community.

Similar Datasets

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