ABSTRACT The Earth's climate is changing at a rapid pace. To survive in increasingly fluctuating and unpredictable environments, species can either migrate or evolve through local adaptation, plasticity and/or bet-hedging. For small ectotherm insects, like parasitoids their hosts, phenotypic bet-hedging could be critical strategies for population persistence response to immediate, intense tempe...

Abstract Climate change can affect biological pest control by altering trophic interactions. Elevated carbon dioxide (CO 2 ) concentrations reduce host plant quality and, in turn, alter herbivore and natural enemy preference performance. Using the Geisenheim VineyardFACE (free-air enrichment) facility, we studied plant- herbivore-mediated bottom-up effects of elevated CO concentration on Europe...

Natural parasitoid systems exhibit considerable variation in their life history properties yet little is known about the effects of development time on parasitoid fitness or of the conditions that might select for rapid development at the expense of reduced parasitoid growth. In this study the techniques of adaptive dynamics are applied to a discrete time host-parasitoid model to examine the ev...

The interactions between Drosophila melanogaster and the parasitoid wasps that infect species provide an important model for understanding host–parasite relationships. Following infection, D. larvae mount a response in which immune cells (hemocytes) form capsule around wasp egg, then melanizes, leading to death of parasitoid. Previous studies have found host hemocyte load; number hemocytes avai...

Plant chemical defenses can negatively affect insect herbivore fitness, but they can also decrease herbivore palatability to predators or decrease parasitoid fitness, potentially changing selective pressures on both plant investment in production of chemical defenses and host feeding behavior. Larvae of the fern moth Herpetogramma theseusalis live in and feed upon leaf shelters of their own con...

Selfish interests usually preclude resource sharing, but under some conditions collective actions enhance per capita gains. Such Allee effects underlay early explanations of social evolution but current understanding focusses on kin selection (inclusive fitness). We find an Allee effect that explains unusual quasisociality (cooperative brood care) among parasitoid wasps without invoking or prec...

In this paper, we formulate a three-species ecological community model consisting of two aphid species (Acyrthosiphon pisum and Megoura viciae) and a specialist parasitoid (Aphidius ervi) that attacks only one of the aphids (A pisum). The model incorporates both density-mediated and trait-mediated host-parasitoid interactions. Our analysis shows that the model possesses much richer and more rea...

Ecological specialization should minimize niche overlap, yet herbivorous neotropical flies (Blepharoneura) and their lethal parasitic wasps (parasitoids) exhibit both extreme specialization and apparent niche overlap in host plants. From just two plant species at one site in Peru, we collected 3636 flowers yielding 1478 fly pupae representing 14 Blepharoneura fly species, 18 parasitoid species ...

This study investigated the effects of ant attendance on the parasitoid community and parasitism of lac insect Kerria yunnanensis aggregations in Yunnan province, China. We manipulated ant attendance to establish three treatments: (1) ant exclusion; (2) low ant attendance by several ant species; and (3) high ant attendance by Crematogaster macaoensis. Five parasitoid species were collected, wit...