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Plant-Insect Ecosystems

Poster: P-IE, General IPM and Biocontrol

Networking: Tritrophic interactions in a generalist caterpillar-parasitoid system

Tuesday, November 11, 2025
9:00 AM - 5:00 PM Pacific
Location: Exhibit Hall A-A1, OCC
Poster Display
Limacodidae, or slug moth caterpillars, are unusual among lepidopterans for their polyphagy, colorful larval morphologies, and venomous spines. While outbreaks in North America are rare, many species occur as agricultural pests on palms and fruit trees in tropical regions of Asia and the Americas. Prior studies have shown that within agricultural settings, these pest species are attacked by many koinobiont parasitoids, which allow them to continue feeding and growing after parasitism. However, the ecology of plant-caterpillar-parasitoid interactions in natural settings, where these caterpillars exhibit an unusually high degree of polyphagy, remains understudied. In order to investigate the composition of this tritrophic community, we reared Limacodidae larvae collected from woody plants from 2004-2023 at eight different sites in the DC metro area. Larvae were reared in the lab at George Washington University and monitored for emerging parasitoids. These efforts resulted in a dataset containing 951 individual tritrophic interactions, encompassing 9 plant species, 10 host caterpillar species, and 11 parasitoid species. Using the Bipartite package in R, we generated a total of 12 bipartite and tripartite networks and calculated their associated metrics, which included connectance, nestedness, modularity, and H2’ (specialization). In contrast to previously studied plant-caterpillar-parasitoid networks, ours exhibited a high degree of connectance, indicating an elevated level of polyphagy even among parasitoids. It also displayed high nestedness, low specialization, and low modularity. The generalist-driven structure observed here is in opposition to what we expect from networks involving koinobiont endoparasitoids, which are believed to exhibit a high level of host specificity.