Abstract
Experimental approaches to studying life-history traits in minute herbivorous arthropods are hampered by the need to work with detached host plant material and the difficulty of maintaining that material in a suitable condition to support the animal throughout the duration of the test. In order to address this shortcoming, we developed a customizable agar-based medium modified from an established plant cell-culture medium to nourish detached leaves laid atop it while also preventing arthropods from escaping the experimental arena. The artificial culture medium was tested with two herbivorous mite species: the wheat curl mite (Aceria tosichella; Eriophyidae) and two-spotted spider mite (Tetranychus urticae; Tetranychidae). The proposed approach was a major improvement over a standard protocol for prolonged studies of individual eriophyid mites and also provided some benefits for experiments with spider mites. Moreover, the described method can be easily modified according to the requirements of host plant species and applied to a wide range of microherbivore species. Such applications include investigations of life-history traits and other ecological and evolutionary questions, e.g. mating or competitive behaviours or interspecific interactions, assessing invasiveness potential and predicting possible outbreaks. The approach presented here should have a significant impact on the advancement of evolutionary and ecological research on microscopic herbivores.
Highlights
Organisms have evolved a great variety of life histories that are keys to understanding the action of natural selection and species diversity including complexities of their life cycles[1]
We tested the proposed methodology using the phytophagous mites Aceria tosichella (Keifer, 1969) belonging to Eriophyidae and Tetranychus urticae (Koch, 1836) belonging to Tetranychidae, as study subjects. This was accomplished through modifications of a standard Murashige and Skoog medium (MS medium)[27], which allowed: (a) prevention of study subjects escaping the arena, (b) maintenance of healthy plant fragments and, (c) prevention of fungal or bacterial contamination
Ecologists increasingly use experimental methods in order to explain the mystery of the remarkable diversity of life
Summary
Organisms have evolved a great variety of life histories that are keys to understanding the action of natural selection and species diversity including complexities of their life cycles[1]. Methods for maintaining and rearing individual arthropod specimens on plant fragments have been reported, e.g. maintenance of plant tissues on moist cotton balls or a hydrogel layer[9,10], but such protocols often www.nature.com/scientificreports have drawbacks due to necrosis and other deterioration that occurs during incubation of the plant fragment. Such approaches are largely limited to short-term studies. We demonstrated this method in an experiment assessing the developmental time and survival of WCM, including daily observations of individual mites
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