Abstract
Artificial light at night has a wide range of biological effects on both plants and animals. Here, we review mechanisms by which artificial light at night may restructure ecological communities by modifying the interactions between species. Such mechanisms may be top-down (predator, parasite or grazer controlled), bottom-up (resource-controlled) or involve non-trophic processes, such as pollination, seed dispersal or competition. We present results from an experiment investigating both top-down and bottom-up effects of artificial light at night on the population density of pea aphids Acyrthosiphon pisum in a diverse artificial grassland community in the presence and absence of predators and under low-level light of different spectral composition. We found no evidence for top-down control of A. pisum in this system, but did find evidence for bottom-up effects mediated through the impact of light on flower head density in a leguminous food plant. These results suggest that physiological effects of light on a plant species within a diverse plant community can have detectable demographic effects on a specialist herbivore.
Highlights
Light is a major abiotic force influencing the physiology, behaviour and reproduction of both plants and animals
We found no evidence for top-down control of A. pisum in this system, but did find evidence for bottom-up effects mediated through the impact of light on flower head density in a leguminous food plant
Lotus pedunculatus inflorescence counts were best characterized by a repeated measures zero-inflated negative binomial (ZINB) model incorporating interacting effects of time and herbivory and an effect of light treatment
Summary
Light is a major abiotic force influencing the physiology, behaviour and reproduction of both plants and animals. Direct effects on a single species can lead to complex and far-reaching indirect effects on others and on the structure and function of the ecosystem Examples of such cascading effects exist across marine, freshwater and terrestrial ecosystems [9,10,11,12,13]. It is widely recognized that both top-down and bottom-up controls occur in many systems [20] and that the relative influence of these controls can be context-dependent, varying with season [21,22], location [23,24] and ecosystem type [25] Both bottom-up and top-down regulation may be triggered by changes
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