Data from: Increased fluctuation in a butterfly metapopulation leads to diploid males and decline of a hyperparasitoid
No Thumbnail Available
Restricted Availability
Date
2018-07-23, 2018-07-23
Persistent identifier of the Data Catalogue metadata
Creator/contributor
Editor
Journal title
Journal volume
Publisher
Publication Type
dataset
dataset
dataset
Peer Review Status
Repositories
Access rights
Open
ISBN
ISSN
Description
Climate change can increase spatial synchrony of population dynamics, leading to large-scale fluctuation that destabilizes communities. High trophic level species such as parasitoids are disproportionally affected because they depend on unstable resources. Most parasitoid wasps have complementary sex determination, producing sterile males when inbred, which can theoretically lead to population extinction via the diploid male vortex. We examined this process empirically using a hyperparasitoid population inhabiting a spatially structured host population in a large fragmented landscape. Over four years of high host butterfly metapopulation fluctuation, diploid male production by the wasp increased, and effective population size declined precipitously. Our multitrophic spatially structured model shows that host population fluctuation can cause local extinctions of the hyperparasitoid due to the diploid male vortex. However, regionally it persists because spatial structure allows for efficient local genetic rescue via balancing selection for rare alleles carried by immigrants. This is the first empirically based study of the possibility of the diploid male vortex in a natural host-parasitoid system.