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Pepper domestication enhances parasitoid recruitment to herbivore-damaged plants

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Abstract

Plant breeding has improved traits such as fruit flavor and yield but may have compromised direct and indirect defenses to herbivores compared to their wild ancestors. This has been termed the plant domestication-reduced defense hypothesis. We present evidence that domestication of Capsicum annuum (the chili pepper) from its wild progenitor, Capsicum annuum var. glabriusculum, has not affected resistance to the insect herbivore, Manduca sexta (the tobacco hornworm). Caterpillars performed equally well on the domesticated and wild pepper. Subsequent behavioral choice assays with one of the main natural enemies of M. sexta, the parasitoid wasp Cotesia congregata, showed that parasitoids preferentially chose herbivore-damaged domesticated pepper plants over their wild relative. To investigate this tri-trophic interaction further, we then assessed the efficiency of C. congregata to parasitize M. sexta on numerous wild pepper accessions and domesticated pepper cultivars in a large foraging enclosure. We found that herbivores feeding on domesticated plants were parasitized at more than twice the rate of those on wild genotypes. These results imply that pepper domestication has not changed resistance to herbivorous insects (i.e., leaf palatability as a direct defense), but rather has improved volatile attraction to recruit natural enemies.

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Acknowledgements

This work was supported by an NSF Graduate Research Fellowship, award number DGE-1333468. The authors would like to thank Drs. Juli Carrillo, Kathryn Ingerslew, Laura Ingwell, Ulianova Vidal-Gomez, Peter Dunn, Michael Scharf, and Jason Hoverman for providing thoughtful comments to improve the experiments and manuscript; Wadih Ghanem and Dr. Ulianova Vidal Gómez for help conducting experiments; Dr. Robert Raguso for supplying tobacco hornworms; and Drs. Justin Bredlau and Karen Kester for suppling parasitoid wasps. Data for the associated described experiments are available from the authors upon request.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Biological Sciences, Louisiana State University, 232 Life Sciences Building, Baton Rouge, LA, 70803, USA

    Michael Garvey

  2. Department of Biological Sciences, Purdue University Northwest, Hammond, IN, 46323, USA

    Curtis Creighton

  3. Department of Entomology, Purdue University, West Lafayette, IN, 47907, USA

    Michael Garvey & Ian Kaplan

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  1. Michael Garvey
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  2. Curtis Creighton
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  3. Ian Kaplan
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MG, CC, and IK conceived the ideas and designed methodology; MG collected the data; MG analyzed the data; MG led the writing of the manuscript. All authors contributed critically to the drafts and gave final approval for publication.

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Correspondence to Michael Garvey.

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Garvey, M., Creighton, C. & Kaplan, I. Pepper domestication enhances parasitoid recruitment to herbivore-damaged plants. Arthropod-Plant Interactions 14, 695–703 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11829-020-09788-z

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