Tag Archives: damselfly

Not Giving Into the (Selection) Pressure

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A common measure of prey immune function is not constrained by the cascading effects of predators (2021) Hasik et al., Evolutionary Ecology. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10682-021-10124-x

Image Credit: Adam Hasik, Image Cropped

The Crux

The immune function is a critical component of an organism’s ability to defend itself from parasites and disease. Without it, we would be in much worse shape when we got sick. Despite this usefulness, the immune function is costly to use as organisms have to consume enough food to have the energy needed to mount an immune response. This is easier said than done, however, and there are often many factors that come into play when it comes to acquiring energy.

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The Healthy Male Wins the Mate

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Guest post by Miguel Gómez-Llano (Image Credit: Sharp Photography, CC BY-SA, Image Cropped)

Male-Male Competition Causes Parasite-Mediated Sexual Selection for Local Adaptation (2020) Gómez-Llano et al., The American Naturalist, https://doi.org/10.5061/dryad.cjsxksn35

The Crux

The natural world changes constantly: temperatures fluctuate, predators and parasites enter into the ecosystem, and the landscape itself could change (looking at you, Yellowstone). These changes mean that organisms are under a constant pressure to adapt to local conditions. Due to this pressure, one of the biggest questions for conservation biology is if species are able to adapt fast enough to keep up with environmental changes. Sexual selection is thought to promote rapid adaptation to such environmental changes, but most of the evidence comes from laboratory studies.

Our study looked at adaptation to one of nature’s ubiquitous pressures: parasitism. We were interested in the strength of selection by parasites and if there was subsequent adaptation by the host in a wild population.

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Don’t Compete If You Don’t Want to Get Eat(en)

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Image Credit: Judy Gallagher, CC BY 2.0, Image Cropped

Predators weaken prey intraspecific competition through phenotypic selection (2020) Siepielski, Hasik et al., Ecology Letters, https://doi.org/10.1111/ele.13491

The Crux

We are all familiar with predator-prey relationships in nature, those in which one organism (a predator) kills and consumes another (the prey). Besides these direct effects on prey via consumption, predators can also impose indirect effects on their prey. An indirect effect is one in which the predator changes some aspect of the prey, such as their behavior or the way that they look, but these changes are brought about just by the predator being around. These predator-mediated effects are known to affect the relationships between prey organisms themselves, such as how prey organisms compete with one another, whether its for food, mates, or other resources.

Predators are known to affect how active their prey are, and this selection on activity results in a trade-off between how much prey can grow and their risk of predation. Being more active can allow you to find and eat more food, but that also means that a potential predator is more likely to see you. Today’s paper used larval damselflies and their fish predators to study how selection of fish on their damselfly prey based on the damselfly activity rates affected competition between the damselflies.

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Finished Before You Even Started

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Predators are known to affect prey while they are adults and juveniles, but what about when they haven’t even hatched yet?  (Image Credit: Mark Jones, CC BY 2.0, Image Cropped)

Predation risk affects egg mortality and carry over effects in the larval stages in damselflies (2018) Sniegula et al., Freshwater Biology, p. 1-9

The Crux

In the natural world, one of the most dangerous things that a prey animal has to worry about is a predator. These organisms depend on the prey for their sustenance, and as such have become very good at finding ways to eat them. These are known as direct effects, as a predator eating prey is a direct interaction.

Another aspect of the predator-prey relationship is that of indirect effects, or effects that a predator has on prey that don’t involve it eating the prey animal. These can include predator-induced changes in the prey’s behavior, immune function, or even survival. These indirect effects are usually studied in prey species that are adults or juveniles, but the authors of today’s paper were interested in what indirect effects predators had on the eggs of prey species.

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