An invasive insect with an insatiable appetite can cause serious problems for a favorite native moth that likes the same food source—even though the two are never in direct competition for a meal, according to new research, published in the journal Ecology and Evolution, from University of Wisconsin–Madison ecologists. Since the early 2000s, spongy moth caterpillars, an import from Europe, have flexed their gustatory muscle in Wisconsin by stripping entire stands of trees of their leaves during late spring and early summer in remarkably destructive feeding binges. …Because the spongy moth caterpillar ends its leaf-eating spree relatively early in the aspen tree’s growing season, the defoliated trees produce a second flush of leaves to capture enough energy to survive (if not necessarily thrive) through the winter and into the next growth year. … “By mid-summer, they produced an entirely new set of leaves that had, on average, an eight-times higher concentration of defense chemicals.”