A taste for beauty: how flower-feeding caterpillars find their foraging niche
Informations
- Funding country
Netherlands- Acronym
- -
- URL
- -
- Start date
- 1/1/2019
- End date
- -
- Budget
- 250,000 EUR
Fundings
| Name | Role | Start | End | Amount |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Talent Programme | Grant | - | - | - |
Abstract
Caterpillars are often assumed to be little more than voracious feeding machines devastating many crop plants. Yet, these small creatures have to accomplish complex tasks, such as balancing their nutritional needs while avoiding plant defences and hiding from their natural enemies. To do so, caterpillars use a surprisingly sophisticated set of chemoreceptors to provide them with the information needed to survive in their small, but complex environments. Within a plant, flowers and leaves represent the two most contrasting food sources for a caterpillar: Flowers are often rich in protein but also highly defended by plant toxins, while leaves are high in carbohydrates and often lower in toxic secondary metabolites. Flowers and leaves also attract very different animal communities, which both contain different species of natural enemies that prey on caterpillars in different ways. Therefore, the decision where to feed will depend on many interacting factors and understanding the caterpillar’s behaviour will thereby, not only shed light on the caterpillar itself, but also on the related plant-insect community. In this project, I will combine neurobiological, ecological and molecular tools to identify the chemosensory receptors in different caterpillar species and create insect lines in which these receptors are genetically silenced. The response of these caterpillars to floral and leaf volatiles will then be investigated within its ecological context. Through this, I will be able to determine the ecological pressures, which have shaped the receptor set of the caterpillar. Comparing these receptors in the caterpillar to those in the nectar-feeding adult, which I recently identified, we will gain new insights into whether flower feeding has evolved in relation to pollination or is driven by independent selection pressures, such as enemy avoidance. This project will unravel important factors, which drive feeding strategies and the formation of complex foraging niches within an agriculturally important system.