Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-lnqnp Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-24T19:16:53.417Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Abiotic effects on the clear-winged grasshopper (Orthoptera: Acridae) and its fungal pathogen Entomophaga grylli (Entomophthorales: Entomophthoraceae) in an intermountain bunch-grass prairie

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  06 January 2017

Erica J. Kistner  and
Gary E. Belovsky
Erica J. Kistner*
Affiliation:
United States Department of Agriculture, Agricultural Research Service, National Laboratory for Agriculture and the Environment,Ames, Iowa, 50011, United States of America
Gary E. Belovsky
Affiliation:
Department of Biological Sciences, Environmental Research Center, University of Notre Dame, 094 Galvin Life Sciences, Notre Dame, Indiana, 46556, United States of America
*
1Corresponding author (e-mail: ekistnerphd2014@gmail).
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

The grasshopper, Camnula pellucida Scudder (Orthoptera: Acridae), is a severe pest of small grains and rangeland forage in North America. In a field experiment using cages containing C. pellucida in northwestern Montana, United States of America, we manipulated exposure to the fungal entomopathogen, Entomophaga grylli Fresenius (Entomophthorales: Entomophthoraceae) pathotype 1, temperature using small greenhouses, and moisture for the pathogen with water pillows. Treatment effects on fungal infection (mycosis) rates and grasshopper survivorship were assessed. Water pillows provided additional moist habitat for E. grylli without having an impact on grasshopper performance or the plant biomass and nitrogen content. Number of fungal spores, pathogen-induced mortality rates, and treatment effects on grass biomass and nitrogen content were also measured. Water pillows benefited the pathogen by increasing fungal spore levels by eightfold, which in turn shortened pathogen-exposed grasshopper survival time by half. In contrast, warming reduced fungal spore levels by 50% and subsequently reduced mortality from E. grylli by 67%. However, warmed pathogen-exposed grasshoppers did not exhibit enhanced survival, which may be due, in part, to intraspecific competition among the surviving grasshoppers.

Type
Behaviour & Ecology
Information
The Canadian Entomologist , Volume 149 , Issue 3 , June 2017 , pp. 315 - 325
Copyright
© Entomological Society of Canada 2017 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Footnotes

Subject editor: Susan Bjornson

References

Belovsky, G.E. and Joern, A. 1995. The dominance of different regulating mechanisms for rangeland grasshoppers. In Population dynamics: new approaches and synthesis. Edited by N. Cappuccino and P. Price. Academic Press, New York, New York, United States of America. Pp. 359–386.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Belovsky, G.E. and Slade, J.B. 1993. The role of vertebrate and invertebrate predators in a grasshopper community. Oikos, 68: 193–201.Google Scholar
Belovsky, G.E. and Slade, J.B. 1995. Dynamics of two Montana grasshopper populations: relationships among weather, food abundance and intraspecific competition. Oecologia, 101: 383–396.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Belovsky, G.E. and Slade, J.B. 2000. Insect herbivory accelerates nutrient cycling and increases plant production. Proceedings from the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 97: 14412–14417.Google Scholar
Belovsky, G.E. and Slade, J.B. 2010. Observations on non-additive predation: birds and grasshoppers. Evolutionary Ecology Research, 12: 739–749.Google Scholar
Bidochka, M.J., Walsh, S.R., Ramos, M.E., St. Leger, R.J., Silver, J.C., and Roberts, D.W. 1996. Fate of biological control introductions: monitoring an Australian fungal pathogen of grasshoppers in North America. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 93: 918–921.Google Scholar
Boomsma, J.J., Jensen, A.B., Meyling, N.V., and Eilenberg, J. 2014. Evolutionary interaction networks of insect pathogenic fungi. Annual Review of Entomology, 59: 467–485.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Branson, D.H. 2008. Influence of a large late summer precipitation event on food limitation and grasshopper population dynamics in a northern Great Plains grassland. Environmental Entomology, 37: 686–695.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Carruthers, R.I., Feng, Z., Ramos, M.E., and Soper, R.S. 1988a. The effect of solar radiation on the survival of Entomophaga grylli (Entomophthorales: Entomophthoraceae) conidia. Journal of Invertebrate Pathology, 52: 154–162.Google Scholar
Carruthers, R.I., Larkin, T.S., Firstencel, H., and Feng, Z. 1992. Influence of thermal ecology on the mycosis of a rangeland grasshopper. Ecology, 73: 190–204.Google Scholar
Carruthers, R.I., Larkin, T.S., and Soper, R.S. 1988b. Simulation of insect disease dynamics: an application of SERB to a rangeland ecosystem. Simulation, 51: 101–109.Google Scholar
Carruthers, R.I., Ramos, M.E., Larkin, T.S., Hostetter, D.L., and Soper, R.S. 1997. The Entomophaga grylli (Fresenius) Batko species complex: its biology, ecology, and use for biological control of pest grasshoppers. Memoirs of the Entomological Society of Canada, 129: 329–353.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Crawley, M.J. 2013. The R book, 2nd edition. John Wiley & Sons, West Sussex, United Kingdom.Google Scholar
Dempster, J. 1963. The population dynamics of grasshoppers and locusts. Biological Reviews, 38: 490–529.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Elliot, S.L., Blanford, S., and Thomas, M.B. 2002. Host–pathogen interactions in a varying environment: temperature, behavioral fever and fitness. Proceedings from the Royal Society of London Series B, 269: 1599–1607.Google Scholar
Erlandson, M., Johnson, D.L., and Olfert, O. 1988. Entomophaga grylli (Fresenius) infections in grasshopper (Orthoptera: Acrididae) populations in Saskatchewan and Alberta, 1985–1986. The Canadian Entomologist, 120: 205–209.Google Scholar
Goettel, M.S., Johnson, D.L., and Inglis, G.D. 1995. The role of fungi in the control of grasshoppers. Canadian Journal of Botany, 73: 71–75.Google Scholar
Hajek, A.E., Larkin, T.S., Carruthers, R.I., and Soper, R.S. 1993. Modeling the dynamics of Entomophaga maimaiga (Zygomycetes: Entomophthorales) epizootics in gypsy moth (Lepidoptera: Lymantriidae) populations. Environmental Entomology, 22: 1172–1187.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hajek, A. and St. Leger, R. 1994. Interactions between fungal pathogens and insect hosts. Annual Review of Entomology, 39: 293–322.Google Scholar
Harvell, C.D., Mitchell, C.E., Ward, J.R., Altizer, S., Dobson, A.P., Ostfeld, R.S., et al. 2002. Climate warming and disease risks for terrestrial and marine biota. Science, 296: 2158–2162.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Inglis, G.D., Johnson, D.L., and Goettel, M.S. 1997. Effects of temperature and sunlight on mycosis (Beauveria bassiana) (Hyphomycetes: Sympodulosporae) of grasshoppers under field conditions. Environmental Entomology, 26: 400–409.Google Scholar
Jaronski, S.T. 2010. Ecological factors in the inundative use of fungal entomopathogens. Biocontrol, 55: 159–185.Google Scholar
Kistner, E.J. and Belovsky, G.E. 2013. Susceptibility to disease across developmental stages: examining the effects of an entomopathogen on a grasshopper (Orthoptera: Acrididae) pest. Journal of Orthoptera Research, 22: 73–77.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kistner, E.J. and Belovsky, G.E. 2014. Host dynamics determine responses to disease: additive versus compensatory mortality in a grasshopper-pathogen system. Ecology, 95: 2579–2588.Google Scholar
Klass, J.I., Blanford, S., and Thomas, M.B. 2007a. Development of a model for evaluating the effects of environmental temperature and thermal behavior on biological control of locusts and grasshoppers using pathogens. Agricultural and Forest Entomology, 9: 189–199.Google Scholar
Klass, J.I., Blanford, S., and Thomas, M.B. 2007b. Use of a geographic information system to explore spatial variation in pathogen virulence and the implications for biological control of locusts and grasshoppers. Agricultural and Forest Entomology, 9: 201–208.Google Scholar
Laws, A.N. and Belovsky, G.E. 2010. How will species respond to climate change? Examining the effects of temperature and population density on an herbivorous insect. Environmental Entomology, 39: 312–319.Google Scholar
Lesica, P. and Kittelson, P. 2010. Precipitation and temperature are associated with advanced flowering phenology in a semi-arid grassland. Journal of Arid Environments, 74: 1013–1017.Google Scholar
MacLeod, D., Cameron, J., and Soper, R. 1966. The influence of environmental conditions on epizootics caused by entomogenous fungi. Revue Roumaine de Biologie, 11: 125–131.Google Scholar
MacLeod, D.M. and Müller-Kögler, E. 1973. Entomogenous fungi: Entomophthora species with pear-shaped to almost spherical conidia (Entomophthorales: Entomophthoraceae). Mycologia, 63: 823–893.Google Scholar
McCluney, K.E. and Sabo, J.L. 2009. Water availability directly determines per capita consumption at two trophic levels. Ecology, 90: 1463–1469.Google Scholar
Ovadia, O. and Schmitz, O.J. 2004. Weather variation and trophic interaction strength: sorting the signal from the noise. Oecologia, 140: 398–406.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Pederson, G.T., Graumlich, L.J., Fagre, D.B., Kipfer, T., and Muhlfeld, C.C. 2010. A century of climate and ecosystem change in western Montana: what do temperature trends portend? Climate Change, 98: 133–154.Google Scholar
Pfadt, R.E. 1994. Field guide to common western grasshoppers. Wyoming Agricultural Experiment Station, Laramie, Wyoming, United States of America.Google Scholar
Pickford, R. and Riegert, P. 1964. The fungous disease caused by Entomophthora grylli Fres. and its effects on grasshopper populations in Saskatchewan in 1963. The Canadian Entomologist, 96: 1158–1166.Google Scholar
R Development Core Team. 2015. R: a language and environment for statistical computing. R Foundation for Statistical Computing, Vienna, Austria.Google Scholar
Roy, H.E., Steinkraus, D., Eilenberg, J., Hajek, A., and Pell, J.K. 2006. Bizarre interactions and endgames: entomopathogenic fungi and their arthropod hosts. Annual Review of Entomology, 51: 331–357.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Sánchez-Peña, S.R. 2005. In vitro production of hyphae of the grasshopper pathogen Entomophaga grylli (Zygomycota: Entomophthorales): potential for production of conidia. Florida Entomologist, 88: 332–334.Google Scholar
Sawyer, A., Ramos, M., Poprawski, T., Soper, R., and Carruthers, R. 1997. Seasonal patterns of cadaver persistence and sporulation by the fungal pathogen Entomophaga grylli (Fresenius) Batko (Entomophthorales: Entomophthoraceae) infecting Camnula pellucida (Scudder) (Orthoptera: Acrididae). Memoirs of the Entomological Society of Canada, 129: 355–374.Google Scholar
Scharff, D.K. 1954. The role of food plants and weather in the ecology of Melanoplus mexicanus (Sauss.). Journal of Economic Entomology, 47: 485–489.Google Scholar
Skaife, S.H. 1925. The locust fungus, Empusa grylli, and its effects on its host. South African Journal of Science, 22: 298–308.Google Scholar
Therneau, T. 2013. A package for survival analysis in S. R package version 2.37-4. R Foundation for Statistical Computing, Vienna, Austria.Google Scholar
Vega, F.E., Chandler, D., Goettel, M.S., Pell, J., and Wajnberg, E. 2010. The ecology of fungal entomopathogens. Springer, New York, New York, United States of America.Google Scholar
Wilding, N. 1970. Entomophthora conidia in the air-spora. Journal of General Microbiology, 62: 149–157.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Zar, J.H. 1999. Biostatistical analysis. Prentice Hall, Upper Saddle River, New Jersey, United States of America.Google Scholar