Abstract

Rapid evolution can influence the ecology of populations, communities, and ecosystems, but the importance of evolution for ecological dynamics remains unclear, largely because the contexts in which evolution is powerful are poorly resolved. Here, we carry out a large observational study to test hypotheses about context dependency of eco‐evolutionary patterns previously identified on the stick insect Timema cristinae. Experiments and observations conducted in 2011 and 2012 documented predator‐mediated negative effects of camouflage maladaptation (i.e., evolutionary dynamics) on: (a) T. cristinae abundance and, (b) species richness and abundance of other arthropods. Here we show that camouflage maladaptation does not correlate with T. cristinae abundance and, instead, is associated with increased abundance and species richness of cohabitating arthropods. We furthermore find that plants with high levels of Timema maladaptation tend to have higher foliar nitrogen, that is, higher nutritional value, and more positive mass‐abundance slopes in the coexisting arthropod communities. We propose explanations for the observed contrasting results, such as negative density‐ and frequency‐dependent selection, feedbacks between herbivore abundance and plant nutritional quality, and common effects of predation pressure on selection and prey abundance. Our results demonstrate the utility of observational studies to assess the context dependency of eco‐evolutionary dynamics patterns and provide testable hypotheses for future work.

Highlights

  • The community of arthropods living with T. cristinae is abundant with non-Timema arthropod abundance, biodiversity, and mass-abunand diverse, hosting at least 150 morphospecies (Farkas et al, 2013), dance slopes, and correlated negatively with foliar carbon:nitrogen and T. cristinae is often the dominant herbivore, regularly equaling ratios We demonstrate these effects in the Resu ts section and the density of all lepidopteran larvae combined

  • To characterize which of volume, carbon:nitrogen ratio, connectivity to Timema populations, these three scenarios best explained covariation of mass-abundance and a two way interactions with host p ant species We used backslope and maladaptation in each host-plant species, we evaluated ward selection to remove terms according to level of significance, rethe difference in arthropod abundance between maladaptation extaining terms at a threshold of α =

  • Study showed that poor camouflage leads to reduced stick insect. These studies demonstrated that intensified bird predation due to poor camouflage leads to reduced arthropod abundance and spemass abundance s opes We argue that this pattern fai s cies richness, as well as reduced herbivory from sap-feeding insects

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Summary

Introduction

Variation in C N across p ant patches p < .001), but richness did not differ between the lower [C]:[N] on Adenostoma plants and on plants with more poorly host-plant species when maladaptation and connectivity are average camouflaged T. cristinae largely indicate higher concentrations of

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