The genetics of chutes and ladders: a community genetics approach to tritrophic interactions
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Community genetics research has firmly established that intraspecific genetic variation in single populations can have large extended ecological consequences for populations and entire communities of organisms. Here, we sought to understand the bottom‐up effects of plant genetic variation on herbivore preference and performance, and the top–down control of predators on herbivores and their joint effects on plant fitness and evolution. Following three ecological genetics field experiments we detected heritable variation in plant traits that influenced both the preference and performance of a specialist weevil on Oenothera biennis . However, the weevil's preference and performance were not genetically correlated among O. biennis plant genotypes. Although predators and parasitoids were abundant, predators had no detectable effect on weevil performance because high egg and larval mortality was caused by non‐predatory factors such as intraspecific competition. Finally, neither the specialist weevil nor predators influenced plant fitness. Our results suggest that the focal tritrophic community studied here is primarily shaped by the bottom–up effects of plant genetic variation on herbivores, while top–down effects have no clear impacts on O. biennis fitness or evolution. We suggest that future studies should incorporate plant intraspecific genetic variation as a fundamental part of tritrophic interactions including their eco‐evolutionary dynamics.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".