Costs and trade-offs of grazer-induced defenses in Scenedesmus under deficient resource

The green alga Scenedesmus obliquus can form inducible defensive morphs under grazing threat. Costs and trade-offs of inducible defense are expected to accompany the benefits of defensive morphs, but are hard to detect under nutrient-sufficient experimental conditions. To test the existence of costs associated with inducible defense, we cultured S. obliquus along resource availability gradients in the presence or absence of infochemical cues from Daphnia, and measured the strength of defensive colony formation and fitness characters. Under the lowest phosphorous concentration, the expression of inducible defensive colony resulted in decreased growth rate, which provides direct evidence for physiological costs. Along the gradient reduction of phosphorous concentration or light intensity, inducible defense in S. obliquus showed a decreasing trend. However, the photosynthetic efficiency of S. obliquus was barely affected by its defense responses, suggesting that the negative correlations between resource availability and colony formation of this alga may be due to resource-based trade-offs in the allocation of limited resources. Thus, our results indicated that expression of inducible defense of S. obliquus was impaired under insufficient phosphorus or light. Furthermore, under severe phosphate deficiency, obvious physiological costs of inducible defense could be detected even though defensive colony formation also decreased significantly.