Biochemical plasticity and the evolution of diet-breadth in toxic insects

The evolution of host plant feeding is critical for understanding insect evolution and in particular the responses of populations to a changing climate. The project seeks to explore how butterflies can alter their biochemical responses to allow the exploitation of different host plants. This is a form of phenotypic plasticity, where a single genotype can produce alternative phenotypes under different environmental conditions. Plasticity is an important adaptation that can allow organisms to survive variable and heterogeneous environments and promote longer-term divergence and diversification.

The project will explore the ecological context, fitness consequences, genetic control and long-term evolutionary trajectory of plasticity in the use of defensive toxins across a diverse group of insects. It will exploit a readily quantifiable and experimentally tractable system in order to understand how butterflies respond metabolically to variations in host plant chemistry. This will have general relevance to understanding how species can respond to a changing climate.