title: Losing a battle but winning the war: moving past preference-performance to understand native herbivore-novel host plant interactions.
abstract: Introduced plants can positively affect population viability by augmenting the diet of native herbivores, but can negatively affect populations if they are subpar or toxic resources. In organisms with complex life histories, such as insects specializing on host plants, the impacts of a novel host may differ across life stages, with divergent effects on population persistence. Most research on effects of novel hosts has focused on adult oviposition preference and larval performance, but adult preference may not optimize offspring performance, nor be indicative of host quality from a demographic perspective. We compared population growth rates of the Baltimore checkerspot butterfly, Euphydryas phaeton, on an introduced host, Plantago lanceolata (English plantain), and the native host Chelone glabra (white turtlehead). Contrary to the previous findings suggesting that P. lanceolata could be a population sink, we found higher population growth rates (λ) on the introduced than the native host, even though some component parameters of λ were higher on the native host. Our findings illustrate the importance of moving beyond preference-performance studies to integrate vital rates across all life stages for evaluating herbivore-host plant relationships. Single measures of preference or performance are not sufficient proxies for overall host quality nor do they provide insights into longer term consequences of novel host plant use. In our system, in particular, P. lanceolata may buffer checkerspot populations when the native host is limiting, but high growth rates could lead to crashes over longer time scales.
authors.affiliation: Odum School of Ecology, University of Georgia, 140 E. Green St, Athens, GA, USA. leone.m.brown@gmail.com.|Department of Biology, Tufts University, 163 Packard Ave, Medford, MA, USA. leone.m.brown@gmail.com.
authors.forename: Leone M
authors.initials: LM
authors.lastname: Brown
authors.affiliation: Institute of Arctic Biology, University of Alaska Fairbanks, 902 N. Koyukuk Dr, Fairbanks, AK, USA.
authors.forename: Greg A
authors.initials: GA
authors.lastname: Breed
authors.affiliation: Department of Botany and Plant Pathology, Oregon State University, 2082 Cordley Hall, Corvallis, OR, USA.
authors.forename: Paul M
authors.initials: PM
authors.lastname: Severns
authors.affiliation: Department of Biology, Tufts University, 163 Packard Ave, Medford, MA, USA.
authors.forename: Elizabeth E
authors.initials: EE
authors.lastname: Crone
mesh_terms: D000818:Animals; D002080:Butterflies; D060434:Herbivory; D007814:Larva; D010058:Oviposition
keywords: Butterflies; Demography; Herbivores; Introduced species; Performance; Plant–insect interactions; Preference