| Budget Amount *help |
¥4,160,000 (Direct Cost: ¥3,200,000、Indirect Cost: ¥960,000)
Fiscal Year 2015: ¥780,000 (Direct Cost: ¥600,000、Indirect Cost: ¥180,000)
Fiscal Year 2014: ¥3,380,000 (Direct Cost: ¥2,600,000、Indirect Cost: ¥780,000)
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| Outline of Final Research Achievements |
The aim of this study was to examine how complex ecological community and rapid evolution of community members influence each other in the field. I constructed large mesocosms covering mature willow trees, and performed manipulative experiments with insect communities and one of the dominant herbivorous insects, the willow leaf beetle, Plagiodera versicolora. In the leaf beetle, a foraging trait has genetic variation (i.e., specialist which exclusively feeds on new leaves and generalist which show non-preference for leaf-age types). I inoculated leaf beetles populations into the mesocosms by the following three ways: specialist only, generalists only, and both types). As a consequence, community structure of diverse insect species differentially developed on a tree crown, according to the beetle treatment. Furthermore, community divergence could feed back to rapid evolution of the foraging trait of the leaf beetle.
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