Enemies lost: parallel evolution in structural defense and tolerance to herbivory of invasive Jacobaea vulgaris

Abstract

According to the Shifting Defense Hypothesis, invasive plants should trade-off their costly quantitative defense to cheaper qualitative defense and growth due to the lack of natural specialist enemies and the presence of generalist enemies in the introduced areas. Several studies showed that plant genotypes from the invasive areas had a better qualitative defense than genotypes from the native area but only a few studies have focused on the quantitative defenses and tolerance ability. We compared structural defenses, tolerance and growth between invasive and native plant populations from different continents using the model plant Jacobaea vulgaris. We examined several microscopical structure traits, toughness, amount of cell wall proteins, growth and root-shoot ratio, which is a proxy for tolerance. The results show that invasive Jacobaea vulgaris have thinner leaves, lower leaf mass area, lower leaf cell wall protein contents and a lower root-shoot ratio than native genotypes. It indicates that invasive genotypes have poorer structural defense and tolerance to herbivory but potentially higher growth compared to native genotypes. These findings are in line with the Evolution of Increased Competitive Ability hypothesis and Shifting Defense Hypothesis. We also show that the invasiveness of this species in three geographically separated regions is consistently associated with the loss of parts of its quantitative defense and tolerance ability. The simultaneous change in quantitative defense and tolerance of the same magnitude and direction in the three invasive regions can be explained by parallel evolution. We argue that such parallel evolution might be attributed to the absence of natural enemies rather than adaptation to local abiotic factors, since climate conditions among these three regions were different. Understanding such evolutionary changes helps to understand why plant species become invasive and might be important for biological control.