Food stress prompts dispersal behavior in apterous pea aphids: do activated aphids incur energy loss?

The pea aphid, Acyrthosiphon pisum (Hem: Aphididae), has been repeatedly used as a model species in a wide range of biological studies including genetics, ecology, physiology, and behavior. When red pea aphids feed on low quality plants in crowded conditions, some individuals lose their color shade and become pale yellowish, while other individuals on the same host plants remain changeless. The pale aphids have been shown to walk significantly faster and migrate more frequently to neighboring plants compared to the original red ones. We hypothesized that the color change and higher activity of pale aphids are directly associated with their suboptimal nutritional status. We showed that the pale aphids have significantly lower wet and dry weights than red ones. Analyses of energy reserves in individual aphids revealed that the pale aphids suffer a significant loss in their lipid and soluble carbohydrate contents. Our results provide a strong link between host quality, body color, dispersal rate, and energy reserves of pea aphids. Apparently, utilization of energy reserves resulted from an imbalance in food sources received by the aphids stimulates them to walk more actively to find new hosts and restore their lost energy. This reversible shift enables aphids to quickly respond to deprived host plants much earlier than the appearance of winged morph and restore their original status when they find appropriate host.