Effects of Temperature on Development and Voltinism of Chaetodactylus krombeini (Acari: Chaetodactylidae): Implications for Climate Change Impacts

RESEARCH ARTICLE Effects of Temperature on Development and Voltinism of Chaetodactylus krombeini (Acari: Chaetodactylidae): Implications for Climate Change Impacts Jeong Joon Ahn1,2, Youngsoo Son3, Yaqian He4, Eungul Lee4, Yong-Lak Park1* a11111 1 Entomology Program, Division of Plant and Soil Sciences, West Virginia University, Morgantown, West Virginia, 26506, United States of America, 2 Research Institute of Climate Change and Agriculture, NIHHS, RDA, 281 Ayeonno, Jeju, 63240, Republic of Korea, 3 Pierce’s Disease Control Program, California Department of Food and Agriculture, Arvin, California, 93203, United States of America, 4 Department of Geology and Geography, West Virginia University, Morgantown, West Virginia, 26506, United States of America * OPEN ACCESS Citation: Ahn JJ, Son Y, He Y, Lee E, Park Y-L (2016) Effects of Temperature on Development and Voltinism of Chaetodactylus krombeini (Acari: Chaetodactylidae): Implications for Climate Change Impacts. PLoS ONE 11(8): e0161319. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0161319 Editor: Raul Narciso Carvalho Guedes, Universidade Federal de Vicosa, BRAZIL Received: March 3, 2016 Accepted: August 3, 2016 Published: August 17, 2016 Copyright: © 2016 Ahn et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. Data Availability Statement: All relevant data are within the paper and its Supporting Information files. Funding: The study was supported by the USDA National Institute of Food & Agriculture (NIFA) Grant NIFA Award: 2014-67004-21631 (http://nifa.usda.gov/ program/agriculture-and-food-research-initiative-afri). The funder had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript. Abstract Temperature plays an important role in the growth and development of arthropods, and thus the current trend of climate change will alter their biology and species distribution. We used Chaetodactylus krombeini (Acari: Chaetodactylidae), a cleptoparasitic mite associated with Osmia bees (Hymenoptera: Megachilidae), as a model organism to investigate how temperature affects the development and voltinism of C. krombeini in the eastern United States. The effects of temperature on the stage-specific development of C. krombeini were determined at seven constant temperatures (16.1, 20.2, 24.1, 27.5, 30.0, 32.4 and 37.8°C). Parameters for stage-specific development, such as threshold temperatures and thermal constant, were determined by using empirical models. Results of this study showed that C. krombeini eggs developed successfully to adult at all temperatures tested except 37.8°C. The nonlinear and linear empirical models were applied to describe quantitatively the relationship between temperature and development of each C. krombeini stage. The nonlinear Lactin model estimated optimal temperatures as 31.4, 32.9, 32.6 and 32.5°C for egg, larva, nymph, and egg to adult, respectively. In the linear model, the lower threshold temperatures were estimated to be 9.9, 14.7, 13.0 and 12.4°C for egg, larva, nymph, and egg to adult, respectively. The thermal constant for each stage completion were 61.5, 28.1, 64.8 and 171.1 degree days for egg, larva, nymph, and egg to adult, respectively. Under the future climate scenarios, the number of generations (i.e., voltinism) would increase more likely by 1.5 to 2.0 times by the year of 2100 according to simulation. The findings herein firstly provided comprehensive data on thermal development of C. krombeini and implications for the management of C. krombeini populations under global warming were discussed. *Scientific Article No. 3278 of the West Virginia Agricultural and Forestry Experiment Station, Morgantown, West Virginia Competing Interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist. PLOS ONE | DOI:10.1371/journal.pone.0161319 August 17, 2016 1 / 22 Impact of Climate Change on Thermal biology of C. krombeini Introduction Climate change affected population dynamics of arthropods in natural and agricultural systems such as temporal asynchrony of interacting populations [1,2]. The Coupled Model Intercomparison Project Phase 5 (CMIP5) predicted that significant future climate change and variability would cause severe impacts on various ecosystems. Among various events caused by climate change, temperature increase could be one of the most influential drivers of ecosystem function [3]. The global average surface temperature has increased over the 20th century by ca. 0.6°C [4] and the rate of increasing surface temperature from 1895 through 2013 was about 0.72°C in the contiguous 48 states of the United States [4]. Temperature is a key abiotic environmental factor that influences growth, development, survival and reproduction of poikilothermic arthropods including insects and mites [5–10]. Although some social insects (e.g. honey bees) can decrease the temperature of their nests by fanning their wings, most of arthropods do not have the ability to manipulate temperature within their nests, making them more vulnerable to temperature increase. Arthropod development occurs within a limited range of temperatures and the thermal range varies among arthropod species. Various empirical models have been applied to describe the relationship between temperature and developmental parameters including the lower and upper developmental thresholds and optimal temperatures [11–14]. In addition, developmental parameters often have been applied for optimizing mass rearing systems, predicting phenology, modeling population growth, determining geographical distribution, and simulating climate change impact [15–18]. Various studies already showed that development of arthropods is sensitive to temperature changes [5,19,20] and a small change in temperature could result in spatial and temporal changes in their phenology. Based on the future climate scenarios of Representative Concentration Pathways (RCPs) [21], annual mean surface temperatures in the eastern United States are predicted with the greatest increase from 2006 to 2100 under RCP 8.5 scenario (+5.7°C), followed by RCP 6.0 (+4.1°C), RCP 4.5 (+3.2°C), and RCP 2.6 (+1.2°C) scenarios (S1 Fig). These four RCP scenarios are new ones presented in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Fifth Assessment Report (AR5) and provide time-dependent projections of atmospheric greenhouse gas concentrations [21]. The simulated increases in surface air temperature over the eastern United States during the 21st century would be significant enough to impact growth and development of arthropods based on temperature increase in the United States during the last century (< +1°C). The Krombein’s hairy-fingered mite, Chaetodactylus krombeini (Acari: Chaetodactylidae), is a cleptoparasitic mite of Osmia bees (Hymenopter (...truncated)