González-Ramírez I, López-Gómez V, Cano-Santana Z, Romero Pérez A, Hernández Cumplido J
Department of Integrative Biology University of California Berkeley Berkeley California USA.
Instituto Nacional de Ecología y Cambio Climático Coordinación General de Contaminación y Salud Ambiental Ciudad de México Mexico.
Ecol Evol. 2024 Jun 17;14(6):e11555. doi: 10.1002/ece3.11555. eCollection 2024 Jun.
Intraspecific variation in plants is expected to have profound impacts on the arthropod communities associated with them. Because sexual dimorphism in plants is expected to provide consistent variation among individuals of the same species, researchers have often studied the effect it has on associated arthropods. Nevertheless, most studies have focused on the effect of sexual dimorphism in a single or a few herbivores, thus overlooking the potential effects on the whole arthropod community. Our main objective was to evaluate effects of 's plant-sex on its associated arthropod community. We surveyed 13 pairs of male and female plants every 2 months during a year (June 2010 to April 2011). Every sampling date, we measured plant traits (water content and leaf thickness), herbivory, and the arthropod community. We did not find differences in herbivory between plant sex or through time. However, we found differences in water content through time, with leaf water-content matching the environmental seasonality. For arthropod richness, we found 68 morphospecies associated with female and 72 with male plants, from which 53 were shared by both sexes. We did not observe differences in morphospecies richness; however, we found sex-associated differences in the diversity of all species and differences on the diversity of the most abundant species with an interesting temporal component. During peak flowering season, male plants showed higher values on both parameters, but during the peak fructification season female plants showed the higher values on both diversity parameters. Our research exemplifies the interaction between plant-phenology and plant-sex as drivers of arthropod communities' diversity, even when plant sexual-dimorphism is inconspicuous, and highlighting the importance of accounting for seasonal variation. We stress the need of conducting more studies that test this time-dependent framework in other dioecious systems, as it has the potential to reconcile previous contrasting observations reported in the literature.
植物的种内变异预计会对与其相关的节肢动物群落产生深远影响。由于植物的性别二态性预计会在同一物种的个体之间提供一致的变异，研究人员经常研究其对相关节肢动物的影响。然而，大多数研究都集中在单一或少数几种食草动物的性别二态性影响上，从而忽略了对整个节肢动物群落的潜在影响。我们的主要目标是评估植物性别对其相关节肢动物群落的影响。在一年（2010年6月至2011年4月）期间，我们每两个月对13对雌雄植株进行一次调查。在每个采样日期，我们测量了植物性状（含水量和叶片厚度）、食草情况以及节肢动物群落。我们没有发现植物性别之间或随时间变化在食草情况上的差异。然而，我们发现含水量随时间变化存在差异，叶片含水量与环境季节性相匹配。对于节肢动物丰富度，我们发现与雌株相关的有68个形态种，与雄株相关的有72个形态种，其中53个是两性共有的。我们没有观察到形态种丰富度的差异；然而，我们发现所有物种的多样性存在性别相关差异，并且在最丰富物种的多样性上存在差异，且具有有趣的时间成分。在盛花期，雄株在这两个参数上的值较高，但在结果盛期，雌株在这两个多样性参数上的值较高。我们的研究例证了植物物候和植物性别作为节肢动物群落多样性驱动因素之间的相互作用，即使植物性别二态性不明显，并强调了考虑季节变化的重要性。我们强调需要进行更多研究来检验其他雌雄异株系统中的这种时间依赖性框架，因为它有可能调和文献中先前报道的相互矛盾的观察结果。
