Tetranychus evansi spider mite populations suppress tomato defenses to varying degrees.

Plant defense suppression is an offensive strategy of herbivores, in which they manipulate plant physiological processes to increase their performance. Paradoxically, defense suppression does not always benefit the defense-suppressing herbivores, because lowered plant defenses can also enhance the performance of competing herbivores and can expose herbivores to increased predation. Suppression of plant defense may therefore entail considerable ecological costs depending on the presence of competitors and natural enemies in a community. Hence, we hypothesize that the optimal magnitude of suppression differs among locations. To investigate this, we studied defense suppression across populations of Tetranychus evansi spider mites, a herbivore from South America that is an invasive pest of solanaceous plants including cultivated tomato, Solanum lycopersicum, in other parts of the world. We measured the level of expression of defense marker genes in tomato plants after infestation with mites from eleven different T. evansi populations. These populations were chosen across a range of native (South American) and non-native (other continents) environments and from different host plant species. We found significant variation at three out of four defense marker genes, demonstrating that T. evansi populations suppress jasmonic acid- and salicylic acid-dependent plant signaling pathways to varying degrees. While we found no indication that this variation in defense suppression was explained by differences in host plant species, invasive populations tended to suppress plant defense to a smaller extent than native populations. This may reflect either the genetic lineage of T. evansi-as all invasive populations we studied belong to one linage and both native populations to another-or the absence of specialized natural enemies in invasive T. evansi populations.

Highly divergent mussel lineages in isolated Indonesian marine lakes.

Marine lakes, with populations in landlocked seawater and clearly delineated contours, have the potential to provide a unique model to study early stages of evolution in coastal marine taxa. Here we ask whether populations of the mussel Brachidontes from marine lakes in Berau, East Kalimantan (Indonesia) are isolated from each other and from the coastal mangrove systems. We analyzed sequence data of one mitochondrial marker (Cytochrome Oxidase I (COI)), and two nuclear markers (18S and 28S). In addition, we examined shell shape using a geometric morphometric approach. The Indonesian populations of Brachidontes spp. harbored four deeply diverged lineages (14-75% COI corrected net sequence divergence), two of which correspond to previously recorded lineages from marine lakes in Palau, 1,900 km away. These four lineages also showed significant differences in shell shape and constitute a species complex of at least four undescribed species. Each lake harbored a different lineage despite the fact that the lakes are separated from each other by only 2-6 km, while the two mangrove populations, at 20 km distance from each other, harbored the same lineage and shared haplotypes. Marine lakes thus represent isolated habitats. As each lake contained unique within lineage diversity (0.1-0.2%), we suggest that this may have resulted from in situdivergence due to isolation of founder populations after the formation of the lakes (6,000-12,000 years before present). Combined effects of stochastic processes, local adaptation and increased evolutionary rates could produce high levels of differentiation in small populations such as in marine lake environments. Such short-term isolation at small spatial scales may be an important contributing factor to the high marine biodiversity that is found in the Indo-Australian Archipelago.