Abstract
Despite the benefits of careful decision-making, not all animals are choosy. One explanation is that choosiness can cost time and energy and thus depend on nutrition. However, it is not clear how allocation to choosiness versus other components of life-history shifts in the face of nutritional stress. We tested 2 hypotheses about the effects of nutritional stress on choosiness and other life-history traits: 1) poor nutrition leads to compensatory shifts in life-history strategy towards greater investment per offspring in terms of choosy oviposition behavior and egg resources, and 2) poor nutrition negatively affects a range of life-history traits. Cabbage white butterfly (Pieris rapae) females were reared under low or high nutrition conditions during the larval and adult stage in a fully factorial design. Choosiness was quantified as avoidance of conspecific models during oviposition. Adult life-history traits included egg number, egg size, and thorax protein. Females that experienced nutritional stress as adults were less choosy and less fecund, in support of the second hypothesis. Yet females that were stressed as larvae invested more in thorax muscle, consistent with the first hypothesis. Overall, adult nutritional stress decreased investment in multiple reproductive traits, including a behavioral trait, but larval stress increased investment in flight, potentially to disperse away from nutritionally poor environments.
| Original language | English (US) |
|---|---|
| Article number | arz022 |
| Pages (from-to) | 852-863 |
| Number of pages | 12 |
| Journal | Behavioral Ecology |
| Volume | 30 |
| Issue number | 3 |
| DOIs | |
| State | Published - Jun 13 2019 |
Bibliographical note
Funding Information:This work was supported by grants to S.J. from the Explorer's Club, the University of Minnesota Ecology, Evolution, and Behavior department (Birney Fellowship), the University of Minnesota Bell Museum, the Sigma Xi Scientific Research Society, and the Animal Behavior Society. The Snell-Rood lab was supported in part by the National Science Foundation (NSF IOS-1354737 to E.S.R.)
Funding Information:
This work was supported by grants to S.J. from the Explorer’s Club, the University of Minnesota Ecology, Evolution, & Behavior department (Birney Fellowship), the University of Minnesota Bell Museum, the Sigma Xi Scientific Research Society, and the Animal Behavior Society. The Snell-Rood lab was supported in part by the National Science Foundation (NSF IOS-1354737 to E.S.R.).
Publisher Copyright:
© The Author(s) 2019. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the International Society for Behavioral Ecology. All rights reserved.
Keywords
- Choosiness
- Diet
- Insect
- Life history
- Oviposition
- Reproductive investment