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Several polyphagous moths are severe crop pests. Diet breadth patterns and mechanisms among polyphagous insects provide an excellent system to study ecological and evolutionary processes in herbivores, driving dietary specialization. However, studies of diet breadth on more than a handful of crops are scarce. Here, we estimated the diet breadth in two species of lepidopteran herbivores from the genus Spodoptera: S. littoralis (SL), with host range including both mono- and dicotyledonous plants and S. frugiperda (SF) Corn strain, primarily adapted to different grass species. Larval performance on 23 crop and wild plant species from 17 families from terrestrial and wetland habitats was compared to an artificial diet in no-choice feeding bioassays. SL survived and performed better on most tested plants, particularly on the family level, except on two monocot plants (maize and leek), where SF performed well. There were five wild non-host plants where both generalists failed to survive. Nutrition indices assay corroborates the findings on a subset of plants. In a subset of plants, larval feeding preference correlated partly, and larval attraction correlated well with larval performance. Female oviposition choice showed a weak correlation with larval performance. This weak correlation implies that these traits are decoupled, and other factors are crucial for female host plant selection. During larval dispersal greenhouse experiments, SL and SF larvae strongly tended to migrate onto their suitable host plants, indicating that this is one factor that modulates female host plant selection. In summary, SL has a broader diet breath compared to SF, surviving on wild plants with no previous exposure. The present study provides the first comprehensive data on the diet breadth of two range-expanding and highly invasive polyphagous herbivores.
Roy et al. (Thu,) studied this question.