Tarnished plant bug and eastern bumble bee in strawberry

<p>Land use change affects both pollinator and herbivore populations with consequences for crop production. Recent evidence also shows that land use change affects insect traits, with intraspecific body size of pollinators changing across landscape gradients. However, the consequences on crop production of trait changes in different plant interactors have not been well-studied. We hypothesized that changes in the body size of key species can be enough to affect crop productivity, and therefore looked at how the field-realistic variation in body size of both an important pollinator, <em>Bombus impatiens</em> (Cresson), and a key pest herbivore, <em>Lygus lineolaris</em> (Palisot), can affect fruit size and damage in strawberry. First, we determined if pests vary in body size along land use gradients as prior studies have documented for pollinators; and second, we tested under controlled conditions how the individual and combined changes in the size of an important pollinator and a key herbivore pest affect strawberry fruit production. The key herbivore pest was smaller in landscapes with more natural and semi-natural habitats, confirming that herbivore functional traits can vary along a land-use gradient. Additionally, herbivore size, and not pollinator size, marginally affected fruit production—with plants exposed to larger pests producing smaller fruits. Our findings suggest that land use changes at the landscape level affect crop production not just through changes in the species diversity of insect communities that interact with the plant, but also through changes in body size traits.</p>