The ecological fitness of ALS-resistant Amaranthus retroflexus and multiple-resistant Amaranthus blitoides

Field studies were conducted to evaluate the ecological fitness of Amaranthus spp. biotypes that evolved resistance to either acetolactate synthase (ALS) inhibitors (A. retroflexus, SuR), to triazine herbicides (A. blitoides, SuS/TR), or to both (A. blitoides, SuR/TR), and estimate their ecological fitness under competitive conditions. The plants were grown in monoculture and in replacement series experiments. The examined mixtures were 100%S, 75%S/25%R, 50%S/50%R, 25%S/75%R and 100%R, at a constant stand of 400 plants m^-2. The SuR and SuS A. retroflexus biotypes attained similar shoot dry biomass per plant, biomass per plot and relative yield total (RYT) = 1. In monoculture, the final shoot biomass of A. blitoides biotypes SuS/TS plants was higher than that of SuR/TR and SuS/TR. A negative effect of association was observed, amensalism, when SuS/TS was grown in mixture with SuR/TR, in favour of the wild type. However, SuR/TR and SuS/TR biomass was not influenced by the presence of the competitor. These data support the hypothesis that the ALS-resistance trait in A. retroflexus and A. blitoides is not associated with growth penalty and did not incur ecological cost in the field. We suggest that the cause of the observed reduction in growth rendering the SuS/TR and SuR/TR less fit than the wild type is due to the triazine resistance, and may facilitate their dissipation.