Climate of origin influences how a herbivorous mite responds to drought-stressed host plants
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Motivated by the current water crisis and severe droughts predicted for the near future worldwide, Migeon et al. investigated how the effects of water limitation on producers scale up to affect life-history patterns of a widespread crop pest, the spider mite Tetranychus urticae. The authors sampled spider mite populations (n = 12) along a striking gradient of climatic conditions (>16 degrees of latitude) in Europe. After letting mites acclimate to lab conditions for several generations, Migeon et al. performed a common garden experiment to quantify how life-history traits of mite populations from different locations respond to drought stress in their host plants.
The manuscript was reviewed by three researchers with a large experience in eco-evo approaches to study insect-plant interactions. Overall, the three reviewers think, and both …Motivated by the current water crisis and severe droughts predicted for the near future worldwide, Migeon et al. investigated how the effects of water limitation on producers scale up to affect life-history patterns of a widespread crop pest, the spider mite Tetranychus urticae. The authors sampled spider mite populations (n = 12) along a striking gradient of climatic conditions (>16 degrees of latitude) in Europe. After letting mites acclimate to lab conditions for several generations, Migeon et al. performed a common garden experiment to quantify how life-history traits of mite populations from different locations respond to drought stress in their host plants.
The manuscript was reviewed by three researchers with a large experience in eco-evo approaches to study insect-plant interactions. Overall, the three reviewers think, and both of us agree, that the manuscript addresses a timely question using an interesting study system. Figures are also clear and appealing; Figure 1 is excellent. However, their assessments also raised concerns about the writing style of the manuscript, methods, statistical analyses, and interpretation of the results. Therefore, we suggest the authors pay careful attention to the valuable comments provided by the three reviewers.
We recommend the authors rework the last paragraph of the introduction to communicate more clearly their a priori predictions on the effects of climate of origin and drought-stress on life history. In addition, we recognize the immense logistic challenges of studying life-history variation across populations, especially considering the spatial scale of the study. However, we can’t help but notice that assaying populations at different moments (line 202) adds a relevant source of noise to the results. As noted by all the reviewers, there is not much to be done about this at this moment, other than acknowledging this issue and interpreting results accordingly. Reviewer 3 presents a suggestion to refocus the article on the intraspecific differences in response to drought stress, but using the intra-population variation, instead of between populations variation to drought response.
The three reviewers pointed out that many sentences of the manuscript are hard to follow because of troublesome grammar or structure. Also, all of them noted that the introduction and discussion could be substantially shortened and streamlined. For instance, the plentiful examples presented along the introduction are informative, but also distract the readers from the central message of the paper. We agree with the reviewers’ assessment and believe that the manuscript would largely benefit from thoughtful proofreading and revision of text structure, not necessarily from an English-native speaker. Minor comments provided by the reviewers are helpful in this sense. Another consensus among reviewers is the need to change the title, which is long indeed, and should mention life history to communicate more clearly the scope of the study. Finally, as mentioned by the reviewers, several of the figures and tables may be moved to supplementary material, so that the readers can better focus on the main results. -
