Loss of adaptation following reversion suggests trade-offs in host use by a seed beetle

Experimental evolution has provided little support for the hypothesis that the narrow diets of herbivorous insects reflect trade-offs in performance across hosts; selection lines can sometimes adapt to an inferior novel host without a decline in performance on the ancestral host. An alternative approach for detecting trade-offs would be to measure adaptation decay after selection is relaxed, i.e., when populations newly adapted to a novel host are reverted to the ancestral one. Lines of the seed beetle Callosobruchus maculatus rapidly adapted to a poor host (lentil); survival in lentil seeds increased from 2% to >90% in <30 generations. After the lines had reached a plateau with respect to survival in lentil, sublines were reverted to the ancestral host, mung bean. Twelve generations of reversion had little effect on performance in lentil, but after 25-35 generations, the reverted lines exhibited lower survival, slower development, and smaller size. The most divergent pair of line...