Date of Award

1-1-2017

Document Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Ph.D.

Organizational Unit

Biological Sciences

First Advisor

Shannon M. Murphy, Ph.D.

Second Advisor

Robin Tinghitella

Third Advisor

Deane Bowers

Fourth Advisor

Julie Morris

Keywords

Intraspecific competition, Interspecific competition, Insects, Caterpillars

Abstract

Competition can have far-reaching consequences for the fitness and distribution of many organisms. In herbivorous insects, competition mediated by a third organism is more common than direct competition and has a strong effect on insect communities; yet most research on indirect competition among herbivores focuses on dietary specialists, and those studies that do include generalists tend to rear them on agricultural crops. My project examines species interactions at three levels: intraspecific competition (within species), interspecific competition (between species), and ecosystem engineering effects at the community level. I studied competition and community interactions of two temporally-separated species of herbivorous insects, western tent caterpillars (Malacosoma californicum) and fall webworms (Hyphantria cunea) on their shared host plant, chokecherries (Prunus virginiana). Within species, I found that time-lagged intraspecific competition reduced larval fitness, that plants that had been fed upon by tent caterpillars the previous season were tougher than plants that had not been fed upon by tent caterpillars, and that there were fewer tent caterpillar egg masses on plants that had tent caterpillars earlier in the season than plants without tent caterpillars. Between species, I found that bottom-up fitness effects on tent caterpillars and both top-down and bottom-up fitness effects on fall webworms which demonstrates that competition can take place in temporally separated generalists through both bottom-up and top-down effects. At the community level, tent caterpillars altered the arthropod community associated with their host plant primarily by increasing predator density by creating structural diversity on their host plants that survives and continued to alter the community into the next year.

My results suggest that dietary generalist insects can have strong competitive and community effects outside of outbreak and agricultural conditions.

Publication Statement

Copyright is held by the author. User is responsible for all copyright compliance.

Rights Holder

Elizabeth Ellen Barnes

Provenance

Received from ProQuest

File Format

application/pdf

Language

en

File Size

92 p.

Discipline

Ecology, Entomology

Download



Share

COinS