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Abstract Species interactions are expected to change in myriad ways as the frequency and magnitude of extreme temperature events increase with anthropogenic climate change.The relationships between endosymbionts, parasites and their hosts are particularly sensitive to thermal stress, which can have cascading effects on other trophic levels.We investigate the interactive effects of heat stress and parasitism on a terrestrial tritrophic system consisting of two host plants (one common, high‐quality plant and one novel, low‐quality plant), a caterpillar herbivore and a specialist parasitoid wasp.We used a fully factorial experiment to determine the bottom‐up effects of the novel host plant on both the caterpillars' life history traits and the wasps' survival, and the top‐down effects of parasitism and heat shock on caterpillar developmental outcomes and herbivory levels.Host plant identity interacted with thermal stress to affect wasp success, with wasps performing better on the low‐quality host plant under constant temperatures but worse under heat‐shock conditions.Surprisingly, caterpillars consumed less leaf material from the low‐quality host plant to reach the same final mass across developmental outcomes.In parasitized caterpillars, heat shock reduced parasitoid survival and increased both caterpillar final mass and development time on both host plants.These findings highlight the importance of studying community‐level responses to climate change from a holistic and integrative perspective and provide insight into potential substantial interactions between thermal stress and diet quality in plant–insect systems. Read the freePlain Language Summaryfor this article on the Journal blog.
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Disturbances in drylands: Interactions among herbivory, drought, and termite activity in savanna plant communities
Abstract Climate models predict increases in the frequency and intensity of extreme‐weather events. The impacts of these events may be modulated by biotic agents in unpredictable ways, yet few experiments cover sufficient spatiotemporal scales to measure the interactive effects of multiple extreme events.We used 15 years of a 28‐year experiment spanning several significant droughts to investigate how rainfall, large herbivores, and soil‐engineering termites affect understorey vegetation in a semi‐arid savanna.Herbivory was the dominant influence on community structure—decreasing cover, increasing species richness, and favouring occurrence of annuals relative to perennials—but these effects were contingent on rainfall and termitaria in non‐additive (hence unpredictable) ways.A separate experiment showed that resource enrichment, mimicking the effects of termitaria, does not straightforwardly compensate for top‐down effects of herbivory.Synthesis. Our study highlights the potency of top‐down forcing in African savannas. It suggests impressive robustness to drought and underscores the value of multi‐decadal experiments for studying interactions among multiple drivers of ecosystem dynamics.
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- PAR ID:
- 10582186
- Publisher / Repository:
- Wiley-Blackwell
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Journal of Ecology
- Volume:
- 113
- Issue:
- 6
- ISSN:
- 0022-0477
- Format(s):
- Medium: X Size: p. 1491-1503
- Size(s):
- p. 1491-1503
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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