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. 2020 Aug 27;14(2):290-296.
doi: 10.1111/eva.13089. eCollection 2021 Feb.

Insect-plant relationships predict the speed of insecticide adaptation

Michael S Crossley  1 , William E Snyder  1 , Nate B Hardy  2
Affiliations

Insect-plant relationships predict the speed of insecticide adaptation

Michael S Crossley et al. Evol Appl. .

Abstract

Herbivorous insects must circumvent the chemical defenses of their host plants and, in cropping systems, must also circumvent synthetic insecticides. The pre-adaptation hypothesis posits that when herbivorous insects evolve resistance to insecticides, they co-opt adaptations against host plant defenses. Despite its intuitive appeal, few predictions of this hypothesis have been tested systematically. Here, with survival analysis of more than 17,000 herbivore-insecticide interactions, we show that resistance evolution tends to be faster when herbivorous insect diets are broad (but not too broad) and when insecticides and plant defensive chemicals are similar (but not too similar). These general relations suggest a complex interplay between macro-evolutionary contingencies and contemporary population genetic processes, and provide a predictive framework to forecast which pest species are most likely to develop resistance to particular insecticide chemistries.

Keywords: insecticide resistance; plant–insect interactions; population genetics; pre‐adaptation; survival analysis.

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Conflict of interest statement

The authors declare no competing interests.

Figures

FIGURE 1
FIGURE 1
Chemical similarity between insecticides and phytochemicals. Boxplots depict Tanimoto similarity (0 = highly dissimilar; 1 = highly similar) between 72 insecticides and their closest phytochemical analogs, grouped according to insecticide mode of action
FIGURE 2
FIGURE 2
Effects of predictors on probability of insecticide resistance evolution. Forest plots depict top‐crops proportional hazards model risk factors. Boxes denote estimated fixed effects. Whiskers show 95% confidence intervals (+ or − 1.96 * SE). The vertical red line denotes an effect of zero
FIGURE 3
FIGURE 3
Effects of predictors on probability of insecticide resistance evolution over time. Line plots depict cumulative hazards effects from top‐crops additive hazards model (light shading represents 95% confidence intervals). The intercept plot shows how the baseline risk of insecticide resistance increases over time. The rest of the plots show how each model covariate modify that baseline hazard
FIGURE 4
FIGURE 4
Top‐crops random forest survival model variable importance
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