Effects of daily fluctuating temperatures on the Drosophila-Leptopilina boulardi parasitoid association.

Koinobiont parasitoid insects, which maintain intimate and long-term relationships with their arthropod hosts, constitute an association of ectothermic organisms that is particularly sensitive to temperature variations. Because temperature shows pronounced natural daily fluctuations, we examined if experiments based on a constant temperature range can mask the real effects of the thermal regime on host-parasitoid interactions. The effects of two fluctuating thermal regimes on several developmental parameters of the Drosophila larval parasitoid Leptopilina boulardi were analyzed in this study. Regime 1 included a range of 16-23-16°C and regime 2 included a range of 16-21-26-21-16°C (mean temperature 20.1°C) compared to a 20.1°C constant temperature. Under an average temperature of 20.1°C, which corresponds to a cold condition of L. boulardi development, we showed that the success of parasitism is significantly higher under a fluctuating temperature regime than at constant temperature. A fluctuating regime also correlated with a reduced development time of the parasitoids. In contrast, the thermal regime did not affect the ability of Drosophila to resist parasitoid infestation. Finally, we demonstrated that daily temperature fluctuation prevented the entry into diapause for this species, which is normally observed at a constant temperature of 21°C. Overall, the results reveal that constant temperature experiments can produce misleading results, highlighting the need to study the thermal biology of organisms under fluctuating regimes that reflect natural conditions as closely as possible. This is particularly a major issue in host-parasitoid associations, which constitute a good model to understand the effect of climate warming on interacting species.

Scanning the European corn borer (Ostrinia spp.) genome for adaptive divergence between host-affiliated sibling species.

It has recently been shown that the European corn borer, a major pest of maize crops, is actually composed of two genetically differentiated and reproductively isolated taxa, which are found in sympatry over a wide geographical range in Eurasia. Each taxon is adapted to specific host plants: Ostrinia nubilalis feeds mainly on maize, while O. scapulalis feeds mainly on hop or mugwort. Here, we present a genome scan approach as a first step towards an integrated molecular analysis of the adaptive genomic divergence between O. nubilalis and O. scapulalis. We analysed 609 AFLP marker loci in replicate samples of sympatric populations of Ostrinia spp. collected on maize, hop and mugwort, in France. Using two genome scan methods based on the analysis of population differentiation, we found a set of 28 outlier loci that departed from the neutral expectation in one or the other method (of which a subset of 14 loci were common to both methods), which showed a significantly increased differentiation between O. nubilalis and O. scapulalis, when compared to the rest of the genome. A subset of 12 outlier loci were sequenced, of which 7 were successfully re-amplified as target candidate loci. Three of these showed homology with annotated lepidopteran sequences from public nucleotide databases.