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Effects Of Anthropogenic Noise On Mating Behavior And Fitness, Gabrielle A. Gurule-Small
Effects Of Anthropogenic Noise On Mating Behavior And Fitness, Gabrielle A. Gurule-Small
Electronic Theses and Dissertations
When environments change rapidly, adaptive phenotypic plasticity can ameliorate negative effects of environmental change on survival and reproduction. Recent evidence, however, suggests that plastic responses to human induced environmental change are often maladaptive or insufficient to overcome novel selection pressures. Anthropogenic noise is a ubiquitous and expanding disturbance with demonstrated effects on fitness-related traits of animals like stress responses, foraging, vigilance, and pairing success. Elucidating the lifetime fitness effects of noise has been challenging because long-lived vertebrate systems are typically studied in this context. In both chapters described herein, I reared field crickets, Teleogryllus oceanicus, in masking traffic noise, …
Diet Breadth Evolution And Diversification Of A Generalist Insect Herbivore, Mayra Cadorin Vidal
Diet Breadth Evolution And Diversification Of A Generalist Insect Herbivore, Mayra Cadorin Vidal
Electronic Theses and Dissertations
Insect herbivores are one of the most diverse groups of multicellular organisms, and the vast majority are specialists, which feed on only a few plant species. The factors that cause some herbivores to be specialists and others to be generalists are still unclear. It is known that the selective forces from natural enemies (top-down) and the host plants (bottom-up) influence an herbivore's diet breadth. In my meta-analysis evaluating the relative important of top-down and bottom-up forces on insect herbivore fitness, I found that herbivores usually have greater performance on better quality plants and in the absence or reduction of enemy …