How should we domesticate crops to enhance pest control?

Crop domestication is the process of artificially selecting plants to increase their suitability to human tastes and cultivated growing conditions. There is growing evidence that crop domestication can profoundly alter interactions among plants, herbivores, and their natural enemies. However, there are relatively few predictions on how insect herbivores and natural enemies may respond to the trait variation caused by crop domestication. We reviewed the literature to determine how insect behavior and growth responds to variation of traits commonly altered by domestication. Our goal was to build a qualitative model on how insect herbivores and natural enemies respond to selection, as the first step towards guiding how to breed during the domestication process to retain traits that promote natural enemy activity. Although individual species can vary considerably in their behavior and life history strategies, this framework can provide insight on how domestication can affect species behavior and responses. Overall, we find that more studies are needed in order to accurately predict how selection on morphological and resistance traits during domestication may affect species interactions across multiple scales in agroecosystems.