Selection pressure by specialist and generalist insect herbivores leads to optimal constitutive plant defense. A mathematical model

Autor: Suman Chakraborty, Jonathan Gershenzon, Stefan Schuster
Jazyk: angličtina
Rok vydání: 2023
Předmět:
Zdroj: Ecology and Evolution, Vol 13, Iss 12, Pp n/a-n/a (2023)
Druh dokumentu: article
ISSN: 2045-7758
35143614
DOI: 10.1002/ece3.10763
Popis: Abstract Brassicaceae plants have the glucosinolate–myrosinase defense system, jointly active against herbivory. However, constitutive glucosinolate (GLS) defense is observed to occur at levels that do not deter all insects from feeding. That prompts the question of why Brassicaceae plants have not evolved a higher constitutive defense. The answer may lie in the contrasting relationship between plant defense and host plant preference of specialist and generalist herbivores. GLS content increases a plant's susceptibility to specialist insects. In contrast, generalists are deterred by the plant GLSs. Although GLSs can attract the natural enemies (predators and parasitoids) of these herbivores, enemies can reduce herbivore pressure to some extent only. So, plants can be overrun by specialists if GLS content is too high, whereas generalists can invade the plants if it is too low. Therefore, an optimal constitutive plant defense can minimize the overall herbivore pressure. To explain the optimal defense theoretically, we model the contrasting host selection behavior of insect herbivores and the emergence of their natural enemies by non‐autonomous ordinary differential equations, where the independent variable is the plant GLS concentration. From the model, we quantify the optimal amount of GLSs, which minimizes total herbivore (specialists and generalists) pressure. That quite successfully explains the evolution of constitutive defense in plants from the perspective of optimality theory.
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