Biological control and climate change: Insight from multi-level species interactions

Climate change has severe and well-documented impacts on the geographic distribution, diversity, and abundance of a variety of organisms. In insects, temperature shifts affect physiology, behavior, seasonal phenology, migration pattern, number of generations per year, and overwintering strategies. In some cases, food web structure, and composition are quite fragile and are likely to rapidly change in the face of climate warming. Plastic and adaptive responses of organisms to new thermal environments could modify species interactions such as competition, predation and parasitism and impact the structure and stability of communities. New species appear while others disappear from food webs and changes in species interactions between trophic levels occur, with potential deleterious consequences on ecosystem functioning. Furthermore, it appears that microbial partners such as facultative symbionts are strongly involved in the insects' relationship with temperature. Many means of mitigation exist such as habitat management or reduction of anthropogenic stresses. In this talk, I present a global view of the effect of climate change on aphid-parasitoid relationships, considering different studies conducted on the behavior, physiology, and repercussion of changes in thermal regimes on interaction networks and thus on the potential for biological control.