Do Native Parasitic Plants Cause More Damage to Exotic Invasive Hosts Than Native Non-Invasive Hosts? An Implication for Biocontrol

Abstract

Field studies have shown that native, parasitic plants grow vigorously on invasive plants and can cause more damage to invasive plants than native plants. However, no empirical test has been conducted and the mechanism is still unknown. We conducted a completely randomized greenhouse experiment using 3 congeneric pairs of exotic, invasive and native, non-invasive herbaceous plant species to quantify the damage caused by parasitic plants to hosts and its correlation with the hosts' growth rate and resource use efficiency. The biomass of the parasitic plants on exotic, invasive hosts was significantly higher than on congeneric native, non-invasive hosts. Parasites caused more damage to exotic, invasive hosts than to congeneric, native, non-invasive hosts. The damage caused by parasites to hosts was significantly positively correlated with the biomass of parasitic plants. The damage of parasites to hosts was significantly positively correlated with the relative growth rate and the resource use efficiency of its host plants. It may be the mechanism by which parasitic plants grow more vigorously on invasive hosts and cause more damage to exotic, invasive hosts than to native, non-invasive hosts. These results suggest a potential biological control effect of native, parasitic plants on invasive species by reducing the dominance of invasive species in the invaded community.

Parasitism by water mites in native and exotic Corixidae: Are mites limiting the invasion of the water boatman Trichocorixa verticalis (Fieber, 1851)?

“…Most studies have focused on the effect of the loss of coevolved parasites during the introduction process ('Enemy Release Hypothesis', Torchin et al 2002Torchin et al , 2003Keane and Crawley 2002;Colautti et al 2004;Prenter et al 2004), and the introduction of exotic parasites arriving with alien hosts to the recipient community ('Parasite Spillover', Dobson and Foufopoulos 2001;Power and Mitchell 2004). However, with the exception of native parasites affecting exotic plants and invertebrates of economic importance, which have been the subject of studies of biological control (Williams et al 2003;Li et al 2012), the acquisition of new parasites by exotic species has been largely overlooked, even though it is potentially a frequent and important process (Kelly et al 2009b;Mastitsky et al 2010). Depending on the mechanism and the role played by the novel parasite, the consequences for the invasion success of the alien host and the impact on the recipient community can be highly variable.…”

Does nitrogen affect the interaction between a native hemiparasite and its native or introduced leguminous hosts?

“…This idea is further supported by the fact that, in our study, photosynthesis of the parasite was similar on both hosts, but the parasite grew significantly larger both in absolute and per unit host biomass terms on U. europaeus than on A. paradoxa (Figs c, a,b). Again, our finding builds on consistent reports that native parasites with indeterminate growth, such as C. pubescens , grow much more vigorously on introduced vs native hosts (Prider et al ., ; Yu et al ., ; Li et al ., ; Cirocco et al ., ). N was not found to influence parasite biomass in absolute terms or on a per g host biomass basis.…”

The invasive sun coral Tubastraea coccinea hosting a native Christmas tree worm at Curaçao, Dutch Caribbean

“…Many reports on introduced species as novel hosts for native parasites concern terrestrial ecosystems (e.g., Prider et al 2009;Li et al 2012;Meijer et al 2015;Van Nieukerken and Geertsema 2015) and freshwater habitats (e.g., Glodosky and Sandland 2014;Subchev 2014). Only a few reports deal with marine host species that are recognized as invasives, and usually their parasites are co-introduced (e.g., Blakeslee et al 2011).…”