Decreased Functional Diversity and Biological Pest Control in Conventional Compared to Organic Crop Fields

Organic farming is one of the most successful agri-environmental schemes, as humans benefit from high quality food, farmers from higher prices for their products and it often successfully protects biodiversity. However there is little knowledge if organic farming also increases ecosystem services like pest control. We assessed 30 triticale fields (15 organic vs. 15 conventional) and recorded vascular plants, pollinators, aphids and their predators. Further, five conventional fields which were treated with insecticides were compared with 10 non-treated conventional fields. Organic fields had five times higher plant species richness and about twenty times higher pollinator species richness compared to conventional fields. Abundance of pollinators was even more than one-hundred times higher on organic fields. In contrast, the abundance of cereal aphids was five times lower in organic fields, while predator abundances were three times higher and predator-prey ratios twenty times higher in organic fields, indicating a significantly higher potential for biological pest control in organic fields. Insecticide treatment in conventional fields had only a short-term effect on aphid densities while later in the season aphid abundances were even higher and predator abundances lower in treated compared to untreated conventional fields. Our data indicate that insecticide treatment kept aphid predators at low abundances throughout the season, thereby significantly reducing top-down control of aphid populations. Plant and pollinator species richness as well as predator abundances and predator-prey ratios were higher at field edges compared to field centres, highlighting the importance of field edges for ecosystem services. In conclusion organic farming increases biodiversity, including important functional groups like plants, pollinators and predators which enhance natural pest control. Preventative insecticide application in conventional fields has only short-term effects on aphid densities but long-term negative effects on biological pest control. Therefore conventional farmers should restrict insecticide applications to situations where thresholds for pest densities are reached

Trophic cascades initiated by fungal plant endosymbionts impair reproductive performance of parasitoids in the second generation

Variation in plant quality can transmit up the food chain and may aVect herbivores and their antagonists in the same direction. Fungal endosymbionts of grasses change the resource quality by producing toxins. We used an aphid-parasitoid model system to explore how endophyte eVects cascade up the food chain and inXuence individual parasitoid performance. We show that the presence of an endophyte in the grass Lolium perenne has a much stronger negative impact on the performance of the parasitoid Aphidius ervi than on its aphid host Metopolophium festucae. Although the presence of endophytes did not inXuence the parasitism rate of endophyte-naïve parasitoids or their oVspring’s survival to adulthood, most parasitoids developing within aphids from endophyte-infected plants did not reproduce at all. This indicates a delayed but very strong eVect of endophytes on parasitoid performance, which should ultimately aVect plant performance negatively by releasing endophyte-tolerant herbivores from top-down limitations