Climate warming and predation risk during herbivore ontogeny

Abstract

Phenological effects of climate change are expected to differ among species, altering interactions within ecological communities. However, the nature and strength of these effects can vary during ontogeny, so the net community-level effects will be the result of integration over an individual's lifetime. I resolved the mechanism driving the effects of warming and spider predation risk on a generalist grasshopper herbivore at each ontogenetic stage and quantified the treatment effects on a measure of reproductive fitness. Spiders caused nymphal grasshoppers to increase the proportion of herbs in their diet, thus having a positive indirect effect on grasses and a negative indirect effect on herbs. Warming strengthened the top-down effect by affecting spiders and grasshoppers differently. In cooler, ambient conditions, grasshoppers and spiders had a high degree of spatial overlap within the plant canopy. Grasshopper position was unaffected by temperature, but spiders moved lower in the canopy in response to warming. This decreased the spatial overlap between predator and prey, allowing nymphal grasshoppers to increase daily feeding time. While spiders decreased grasshopper growth and reproductive fitness in ambient conditions, spiders had no effect on grasshopper fitness in warmed treatments. The study demonstrates the importance of considering the ontogeny of behavior when examining the effects of climate change on trophic interactions. © 2010 by the Ecological Society of America.