Life-History Consequences of Chronic Nutritional Stress in an Outbreaking Insect Defoliator

Food shortage is a common situation in nature but little is known about the strategies animals use to overcome it. This lack of knowledge is especially true for outbreaking insects, which commonly experience nutritional stress for several successive generations when they reach high population densities. The aim of this study is to evaluate the life history consequences of chronic nutritional stress in the outbreaking moth Choristoneura fumiferana. Larvae were reared on two different artificial diets that emulate nutritional conditions larvae face during their natural population density cycle (low and medium quality artificial diets). After four generations, a subset of larvae was fed on the same diet as their parents, and another on the opposite diet. We explored larval life-history strategies to cope with nutritional stress, its associated costs and the influence of nutritional conditions experienced in the parental generation. We found no evidence of nutritional stress in the parental generation increasing offspring ability to feed on low quality diet, but the contrary: compared to offspring from parents that were fed a medium quality diet, larvae from parents fed a low quality diet had increased mortality, reduced growth rate and reduced female reproductive output. Our results support a simple stress hypothesis because the negative effects of malnutrition accumulated over successive generations. Density-dependent deterioration in plant quality is thought to be an important factor governing the population dynamics of outbreaking insects and we hypothesize that chronic nutritional stress can be a driver of outbreak declines of C. fumiferana, and of forest insects in general.