Plant flexible stoichiometry and herbivore compensatory feeding drive
population dynamics across temperature and nutrient gradients
Abstract
Global change drivers like warming and changing nutrient cycles have a
substantial impact on ecosystem functioning. In most modelling studies,
organism responses to warming are described through the temperature
dependence of their biological rates. In nature, however, organisms are
more than their biological rates. Plants are flexible in their elemental
composition (stoichiometry) and respond to variance in nutrient
availability and temperature. An increase in plant carbon-to-nutrient
content means a decrease in food quality for herbivores. Herbivores can
react to this decrease by compensatory feeding, which implies higher
feeding rates and higher carbon excretion to optimize nutrient
acquisition. In a novel model of a nutrient-plant-herbivore system, we
explored the consequences of flexible stoichiometry and compensatory
feeding for plant and herbivore biomass production and survival across
gradients in temperature and nutrient availability. We found that
flexible stoichiometry increases plant and herbivore biomasses, which
results from increased food availability due to higher plant growth.
Surprisingly, compensatory feeding decreased plant and herbivore
biomasses as overfeeding by the herbivore reduced plants to low
densities and depleted their resource. Across a temperature gradient,
compensatory feeding caused herbivore extinction at a lower temperature,
while flexible stoichiometry increased its extinction threshold. Our
results suggest that compensatory feeding can become critical under warm
conditions. In contrast, flexible stoichiometry is beneficial for plants
up to a certain temperature threshold. These findings demonstrate the
importance of accounting for adaptive and behavioural organismal
responses to nutrient and temperature gradients when predicting the
consequences of warming and eutrophication for population dynamics and
survival.