Extremely high relative growth rate makes the cabbage white, Pieris rapae, a global pest with highly abundant and migratory nature

Abstract

The small cabbage white butterfly, Pieris rapae, is an extraordinarily abundant migratory pest of cabbage that causes severe damage worldwide without known reasons. I here show that the average relative growth rate (RGR: the ratio of the daily increase of biomass to total biomass) of herbivore (Gh; an indicator of the growth speed of herbivore) of P. rapae on cabbage during the larval period is larger by far than those of all other insect–plant pairs tested. It exceeds 1.15 (/day),—meaning that the biomass more than doubles each day—compared to 0.1–0.7 for most insect–plant pairs, including that of Pieris melete, a sibling of P. rapae which never becomes a pest of cabbage. My data further showed the RGR in the larval stage (larval Gh), positively correlates with abundance and/or migratoriness of insect herbivores. These results together with my mathematical food web model suggest that the extraordinarily high larval Gh of P. rapae is the primary reason for its ubiquitously severe pest status accompanied with its abundance and migratoriness, and that the RGR of herbivores, Gh, characterizing the plant–herbivore interface at the bottom of the food webs is an important factor affecting whole ecosystems, including animal abundance, fauna size, plant damage levels, competitiveness among herbivorous species, determination of hostplant, invasiveness, and the evolution of animal traits involved in the so-called r/K strategy, such as migratoriness. Knowledge about Gh will be crucial to controlling pests and improving the negative effects of human activity on ecosystems including faunal decline (or defaunation).