Abstract
It is a long‐standing challenge to understand how changes in food resources impact consumer life history traits and, in turn, impact how organisms interact with their environment. To characterize food quality effects on life history, most studies follow organisms throughout their life cycle and quantify major life events, such as age at maturity or fecundity. From these studies, we know that food quality generally impacts body size, juvenile development, and life span. Importantly, throughout juvenile development, many organisms develop through several stages of growth that can have different interactions with their environment. For example, some parasitoids typically attack larger instars, whereas larval insect predators typically attack smaller instars. Interestingly, most studies lump all juvenile stages together, which ignores these ecological changes over juvenile development.We combine a cross‐sectional experimental approach with a stage‐structured population model to estimate instar‐specific vital rates in the bean weevil, Callosobruchus maculatus across a food quality gradient. We characterize food quality effects on the bean weevil's life history traits throughout its juvenile ontogeny to test how food quality impacts instar‐specific vital rates.Vital rates differed across food quality treatments within each instar; however, their effect differed with instar. Weevils consuming low‐quality food spent 38%, 37%, and 18% more time, and were 34%, 53%, and 63% smaller than weevils consuming high‐quality food in the second, third, and fourth instars, respectively. Overall, our results show that consuming poor food quality means slower growth, but that food quality effects on vital rates, growth and development are not equal across instars. Differences in life history traits over juvenile ontogeny in response to food quality may impact how organisms interact with their environment, including how susceptible they are to predation, parasitism, and their competitive ability.
Highlights
Food quality in nature varies seasonally and spatially in response to the environment and is often a key determinant of herbivore life his‐ tory (Awmack & Leather, 2002; Scriber & Slansky, 1981)
Our results showed that head capsule and biomass growth of C. maculatus generally decreased with decreasing food quality (Figures 1 and 2), and development rates and survivorship decreased with decreasing food quality (Figures 4 and 5)
While we found sig‐ nificant food quality effects on all larval life history traits, the size of these effects was not consistent across larval instars
Summary
Food quality in nature varies seasonally and spatially in response to the environment and is often a key determinant of herbivore life his‐ tory (Awmack & Leather, 2002; Scriber & Slansky, 1981). We destructively sample individual bean weevils throughout their entire juvenile ontogeny to estimate instar‐specific growth and survival rates across a food quality gradient using a cross‐sectional experimental approach combined with a stage‐structured popula‐ tion model By tracking both the number of live and dead animals on each sampling date, we can estimate both instar‐ specific development and mortality rates from the observed time series (Nelson, McCauley, & Wimbert, 2004) and show that food quality effects on larval life histories vary significantly across instars
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