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Life-history adaptation under climate warming magnifies the agricultural footprint of a cosmopolitan insect pest

Estelle Burc,Camille Girard-Tercieux,Moa Metz,Elise Cazaux,Julian Baur,Mareike Koppik,Alexandre Rêgo,Alex F Hart,David Berger

Published 2025 in Nature Communications

ABSTRACT

Climate change is affecting population growth rates of ectothermic pests with potentially dire consequences for agriculture and global food security. However, current projection models of pest impact typically overlook the potential for rapid genetic adaptation, making current forecasts uncertain. Here, we predict how climate change adaptation in life-history traits of insect pests affects their growth rates and impact on agricultural yields by unifying thermodynamics with classic theory on resource acquisition and allocation trade-offs between foraging, reproduction, and maintenance. Our model predicts that warming temperatures will favour resource allocation towards maintenance coupled with increased resource acquisition through larval foraging, and the evolution of this life-history strategy results in both increased population growth rates and per capita host consumption, causing a double-blow on agricultural yields. We find support for these predictions by studying thermal adaptation in life-history traits and gene expression in the wide-spread insect pest, Callosobruchus maculatus; with 5 years of evolution under experimental warming causing an almost two-fold increase in its predicted agricultural footprint. These results show that pest adaptation can offset current projections of agricultural impact and emphasize the need for integrating a mechanistic understanding of life-history evolution into forecasts of pest impact under climate change. Current statistical projections of pest impact under climate change neglect the role of rapid genetic adaptation. Here the authors show that evolutionary responses in pest life history traits in response to temperature can offset current projections and magnify agricultural loss under future climate change.

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