Friend or foe? A parasitic wasp shifts the cost/benefit ratio in a nursery pollination system impacting plant fitness.

Nursery pollination systems are species interactions where pollinators also act as fruit/seed herbivores of the plant partner. While the plants depend on associated insects for pollination, the insects depend on the plants' reproductive structures for larval development. The outcome of these interactions is thus placed on a gradient between mutualism and antagonism. Less specialized interactions may fluctuate along this gradient with the ecological context, where natural enemies can play an important role. We studied whether a natural enemy may impact the level of seed consumption of a nursery pollinator and how this in turn may influence individual plant fitness. We used the plant , its herbivore , and its ectoparasitoid as a model plant-herbivore-natural enemy system. We investigated seed output, germination, survival, and flower production as proxies for individual plant fitness. We show that decreases the level of seed consumption by larvae which in turn increased seed output in plants, suggesting that parasitism by may act as a regulator in the system. However, our results also show that plant survival and flower production decrease with higher seed densities, and therefore, an increase in seed output may be less beneficial for plant fitness than estimated from seed output alone. Our study should add another layer to the complex discussion of whether parasitoids contribute to plant fitness, as we show that taking simple proxies such as seed output is insufficient to determine the net effect of multitrophic interactions.