Spatial and temporal variability in the structure of the multiple-herbivore community of horsenettle, and evidence for evolutionary responses in host-plant resistance

Abstract

The geographic mosaic model of plant–herbivore coevolution asserts that interactions between a plant species and an herbivore species vary in intensity among populations across the plant’s geographic range. Despite this model’s intuitive appeal, data to investigate its implications for the type of complex, multiple-herbivore communities that occur in nature are scant. This paper reports on the results of 2 years of field surveys of damage by five leaf herbivores and one stem herbivore in four Solanum carolinense (horsenettle) populations, combined with results of a common-garden study quantifying the mean resistance levels of the plants from each field against each of the six herbivores. The relative amounts of damage caused by each species (representing the “herbivore-community structure”) differed significantly among the four fields. The plants were much more heavily damaged in the 2nd year than in the first, but the herbivore-community structure remained stable within each field between years. Overall, the amount of damage by species of herbivores in a field tended to be positively correlated with the plants’ levels of resistance that were measured in the common garden (r = 0.40, P = 0.05). Specifically, for five of the six herbivores, greater damage in the field was associated with greater plant resistance. This result suggests that horsenettle’s evolution of resistance against specific herbivores can occur rather quickly within fields, creating a local-scale mosaic of populations specifically adapted to the particular structure of the herbivore community that they are facing, but that herbivore-community structure is not strongly determined by plant resistance.