Abstract
The maternal effects of the English grain aphid, Sitobion avenae on offspring phenotypes and performance on wheat varieties with different resistance traits were examined. We found that both conditioning wheat varieties(the host plant for over 3 months) and transition wheat varieties affected the biological parameters of aphid offspring after they were transferred between wheat varieties with different resistance traits. The conditioning varieties affected weight gain, development time (DT), and the intrinsic rate of natural increase (rm), whereas transition varieties affected the fecundity, rm, net reproductive rate, and fitness index. The conditioning and transition wheat varieties had significant interaction effects on the aphid offspring’s DT, mean relative growth rate, and fecundity. Our results showed that there was obvious maternal effects on offspring when S. avenae transferred bwteen wheat varieties with different resistance level, and the resistance traits of wheat varieties could induce an interaction between the conditioning and transition wheat varieties to influence the growth, development, reproduction, and even population dynamics of S. avenae. The conditioning varieties affected life-history traits related to individual growth and development to a greater extent, whereas transition varieties affected fecundity and population parameters more.
Highlights
Phenotypic plasticity is the ability of an organism to express multiple phenotypes with differences in physiology, morphology, or behavior in response to changes in environmental conditions[1,2,3,4,5]
The Weight gain (WG) and development time (DT) were significantly different among the three conditioning varieties, whereas the fecundity differed significantly among the three transition varieties
The mean fecundity of offspring for the three acclimatized S. avenae populations transferred to the Batis was significantly greater than that of the population transferred to WW2730 or Xiaoyan[22] (Fig. 2C)
Summary
Phenotypic plasticity is the ability of an organism to express multiple phenotypes with differences in physiology, morphology, or behavior in response to changes in environmental conditions[1,2,3,4,5]. The transgenerational maternal effect on R. padi were showed that this species produced more alatae when maintained on resistant wheat varieties for 3 months, even when their offspring were maintained on a susceptible wheat variety. These alatae had a higher fitness index (FI) and rm, and better performance on novel hosts than that of maternal hosts[10]. We investigated the transgenerational maternal effect of wheat varieties with different resistance traits on phenotypic plasticity of S. avenae offspring. This research could provide the basis for using the resistance of the host wheat variety to manage infestations of these aphids
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