Abstract
Phenotypic plasticity is likely to be important in determining the invasive potential of a species, especially if invasive species show greater plasticity or tolerance compared to sympatric native species. Here in two separate experiments we compare reaction norms in response to two environmental variables of two clones of the New Zealand mud snail, Potamopyrgus antipodarum, isolated from the United States, (one invasive and one not yet invasive) with those of two species of native snails that are sympatric with the invader, Fossaria bulimoides group and Physella gyrina group. We placed juvenile snails in environments with high and low conductivity (300 and 800 mS) in one experiment, and raised them at two different temperatures (16°C and 22°C) in a second experiment. Growth rate and mortality were measured over the course of 8 weeks. Mortality rates were higher in the native snails compared to P. antipodarum across all treatments, and variation in conductivity influenced mortality. In both experiments, reaction norms did not vary significantly between species. There was little evidence that the success of the introduced species is a result of greater phenotypic plasticity to these variables compared to the sympatric native species.
Highlights
Phenotypic plasticity has long been thought to underlie the ability of a species to colonize new environments or communities and become invasive [1]
We addressed whether differences in phenotypic plasticity between the non-native P. antipodarum and two native species in response to conductivity and temperature may have contributed to the invasion success of P. antipodarum
A post hoc Tukey’s honest significant differences procedure was performed to compare the specific growth rates of the invasive US1 clone to each other snail type. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0093985.t001
Summary
Phenotypic plasticity has long been thought to underlie the ability of a species to colonize new environments or communities and become invasive (i.e., geographically widespread and ecologically dominant) [1]. A large number of studies have measured the plasticity of invasive plants relative to noninvasive or native species, generally finding that invasive species have greater plasticity (reviewed in [2]). Phenotypic plasticity of invasive species may facilitate invasion success by maintaining high fitness despite stressful conditions, achieving higher fitness in favorable conditions, or permitting higher fitness or tolerance under a broader set of conditions [2]. Under each of these possible reaction norms (forms of plasticity), invasive organisms maintain higher mean fitness than natives
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