varying herbivore population structure correlates with lack of local adaptation in a geographic variable plant-herbivore interaction不同食草动物种群结构与缺乏当地适应地理变量plant-herbivore交互.pdfVIP

Varying Herbivore Population Structure Correlates with Lack of Local Adaptation in a Geographic Variable Plant- Herbivore Interaction 1 ´ 2 1 Rodrigo Cogni *, Jose R. Trigo , Douglas J. Futuyma 1 Department of Ecology and Evolution, Stony Brook University, Stony Brook, New York, United States of America, 2 Departamento de Biologia Animal, Instituto de ˜ Biologia, Universidade Estadual de Campinas, Campinas, Sao Paulo, Brazil Abstract Local adaptation of parasites to their hosts due to coevolution is a central prediction of many theories in evolutionary biology. However, empirical studies looking for parasite local adaptation show great variation in outcomes, and the reasons for such variation are largely unknown. In a previous study, we showed adaptive differentiation in the arctiid moth Utetheisa ornatrix to its host plant, the pyrrolizidine alkaloid-bearing legume Crotalaria pallida, at the continental scale, but found no differentiation at the regional scale. In the present study, we sampled the same sites to investigate factors that may contribute to the lack of differentiation at the regional scale. We performed field observations that show that specialist and non-specialist polyphagous herbivore incidence varies among populations at both scales. With a series of common-garden experiments we show that some plant traits that may affect herbivory (pyrrolizidine alkaloids and extrafloral nectaries) vary at the regional scale, while other traits (trichomes and nitrogen content) just vary at the continental scale. These results, combined with our previous evidence for plant population differentiation based on larval performance on fresh fruits, suggest that U. ornatrix is subjecte