Additive Genetic Variation in Resistance Traits of an Exotic Pine Species: Little Evidence for Constraints on Evolution of Resistance Against Native Herbivores

The apparent failure of invasions by alien pines in Europe has been explained by the co-occurrence of native pine congeners supporting herbivores that might easily recognize the new plants as hosts. Previous studies have reported that exotic pines show reduced tolerance and capacity to induce resistance to those native herbivores. We hypothesize that limited genetic variation in resistance to native herbivores and the existence of evolutionary trade-offs between growth and resistance could represent additional potential constraints on the evolution of invasiveness of exotic pines outside their natural range. In this paper, we examined genetic variation for constitutive and induced chemical defences (measured as non-volatile resin in the stem and total phenolics in the needles) and resistance to two major native generalist herbivores of pines in cafeteria bioassays (the phloem-feeder Hylobius abietis and the defoliator Thaumetopoea pityocampa) using half-sib families drawn from a sample of the population of Pinus radiata introduced to Spain in the mid-19th century. We found (i) significant genetic variation, with moderate-to-high narrow-sense heritabilities for both the production of constitutive non-volatile resin and induced total phenolics, and for constitutive resistance against T. pityocampa in bioassays, (ii) no evolutionary trade-offs between plant resistance and growth traits or between the production of different quantitative chemical defences and (iii) a positive genetic correlation between constitutive resistance to the two studied herbivores. Overall, results of our study indicate that the exotic pine P. radiata has limited genetic constraints on the evolution of resistance against herbivores in its introduced range, suggesting that, at least in terms of interactions with these enemies, this pine species has potential to become invasive in the future.