Body-color plasticity of the English grain aphid in response to light in both laboratory and field conditions
- PDF / 1,177,118 Bytes
- 16 Pages / 439.37 x 666.142 pts Page_size
- 51 Downloads / 167 Views
Body‑color plasticity of the English grain aphid in response to light in both laboratory and field conditions K. Tougeron1,2 · J. van Baaren1 · J. Town3 · D. Nordin3 · T. Dumonceaux3 · T. Wist3 Received: 2 September 2020 / Accepted: 21 October 2020 © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020
Abstract The occurrence of different color patterns in a population of a species can depend on genetic variations or plasticity to environmental conditions. Body color variation is under selection because it is involved in several ecological processes such as camouflage for preypredator interactions or resistance to environmental variations. Among insects, aphids are known to produce different body-color morphs depending on their biotic and abiotic environments and their bacterial endosymbionts. The English-grain aphid (EGA) Sitobion avenae produces both red and green morphs in cereal fields. Using both field studies on the Canadian prairies (Saskatchewan) and laboratory experiments, we aimed to study the mechanisms that trigger plasticity in body coloration to better understand the ecological role of body coloration and color-change evolved by animals, including aphids. We first analyzed green and red morph EGA distribution on wheat ears in different fields and showed that red aphids were mostly located at the top of the ear and green aphids at the bottom. Then, using DNA sequencing, we showed that red and green morphs did not strongly differ in their bacterial endosymbiont composition and abundances. Finally, using a climate-chamber setup in the laboratory, we highlighted that EGA body-coloration is under light-intensity control and that it is possible to turn aphids from red back to green within a few days, and from green back to red within a couple of weeks (low-to-high and high-to-low light intensities, respectively). Light-intensity-controlled color-change likely results in adaptive plasticity in response to shifts in environmental conditions that can occur over the lifespan of an aphid, and is fully reversible, even at the adult stage. Keywords Behavioral ecology · Endosymbiont · Light-intensity · Plasticity · Polymorphism · Polyphenism · Sitobion avenae · Wheat
Electronic supplementary material The online version of this article (https://doi.org/10.1007/s1068 2-020-10088-4) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users. * K. Tougeron [email protected] Extended author information available on the last page of the article
13
Vol.:(0123456789)
Evolutionary Ecology
Introduction Many animals have evolved the capacity to produce a range of color patterns at the intraspecific level. Body color variation in the population of a species plays major roles in the animal kingdom and is involved in several ecological processes such as mate finding, thermal tolerance, food foraging, social interactions and camouflage (Duarte et al. 2017; Ford 1966; Majerus 1998; Stevens and Merilaita 2009). Body-color is thus central to evolutionary ecology because it strongly influences individual
Data Loading...
