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Genetic variation in compensatory feeding for dietary dilution in a generalist caterpillar

Increasing the rate of food consumption is a common adaptive strategy that allows herbivores to compensate for declines in nutrient concentrations in plant tissues. Herbivores that are better able to compensate for dietary dilution may have selective advantages under nutritionally poor conditions. I...

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Autor principal: Lee, Kwang Pum
Formato: Online Artículo Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: Nature Publishing Group UK 2017
Materias:
Acceso en línea:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5547126/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/28784992
http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/s41598-017-07822-4
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author Lee, Kwang Pum
author_facet Lee, Kwang Pum
author_sort Lee, Kwang Pum
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description Increasing the rate of food consumption is a common adaptive strategy that allows herbivores to compensate for declines in nutrient concentrations in plant tissues. Herbivores that are better able to compensate for dietary dilution may have selective advantages under nutritionally poor conditions. In order for compensatory feeding to respond to selection, there must be standing heritable variation for this trait. However, empirical data substantiating the adaptive significance and genetic variability of compensatory feeding are rare. By employing a full-sib, split-brood design, this study presents quantitative genetic analyses on the nutrient consumption rates of the generalist caterpillar, Spodoptera exigua, raised on semi-synthetic diets differing in nutrient concentrations. When encountering a diluted diet, caterpillars exhibited a compensatory increase in food consumption rate, but the extent of this increase was not sufficient to fully compensate for dietary dilution. A significant gene-environment interaction for consumption rate indicated that the capacity of caterpillars to compensate for dietary dilution varied across genotypes. The broad-sense heritability of compensatory feeding was 0.51. Caterpillar genotypes with a higher compensatory capacity suffered lower performance losses on the diluted diet than did those with a lower capacity. This study has implications for understanding how herbivores can evolutionarily respond to nutritional challenges.
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spelling pubmed-55471262017-08-09 Genetic variation in compensatory feeding for dietary dilution in a generalist caterpillar Lee, Kwang Pum Sci Rep Article Increasing the rate of food consumption is a common adaptive strategy that allows herbivores to compensate for declines in nutrient concentrations in plant tissues. Herbivores that are better able to compensate for dietary dilution may have selective advantages under nutritionally poor conditions. In order for compensatory feeding to respond to selection, there must be standing heritable variation for this trait. However, empirical data substantiating the adaptive significance and genetic variability of compensatory feeding are rare. By employing a full-sib, split-brood design, this study presents quantitative genetic analyses on the nutrient consumption rates of the generalist caterpillar, Spodoptera exigua, raised on semi-synthetic diets differing in nutrient concentrations. When encountering a diluted diet, caterpillars exhibited a compensatory increase in food consumption rate, but the extent of this increase was not sufficient to fully compensate for dietary dilution. A significant gene-environment interaction for consumption rate indicated that the capacity of caterpillars to compensate for dietary dilution varied across genotypes. The broad-sense heritability of compensatory feeding was 0.51. Caterpillar genotypes with a higher compensatory capacity suffered lower performance losses on the diluted diet than did those with a lower capacity. This study has implications for understanding how herbivores can evolutionarily respond to nutritional challenges. Nature Publishing Group UK 2017-08-07 /pmc/articles/PMC5547126/ /pubmed/28784992 http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/s41598-017-07822-4 Text en © The Author(s) 2017 Open Access This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons license and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.
spellingShingle Article
Lee, Kwang Pum
Genetic variation in compensatory feeding for dietary dilution in a generalist caterpillar
title Genetic variation in compensatory feeding for dietary dilution in a generalist caterpillar
title_full Genetic variation in compensatory feeding for dietary dilution in a generalist caterpillar
title_fullStr Genetic variation in compensatory feeding for dietary dilution in a generalist caterpillar
title_full_unstemmed Genetic variation in compensatory feeding for dietary dilution in a generalist caterpillar
title_short Genetic variation in compensatory feeding for dietary dilution in a generalist caterpillar
title_sort genetic variation in compensatory feeding for dietary dilution in a generalist caterpillar
topic Article
url https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5547126/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/28784992
http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/s41598-017-07822-4
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