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Ecologies
Special Issues
Evolutionary and Behavioral Ecology of Insects
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Evolutionary and Behavioral Ecology of Insects

A special issue of Ecologies (ISSN 2673-4133).

Deadline for manuscript submissions: closed (31 May 2022) | Viewed by 2703

Special Issue Editor

Dr. Mark Asplen

E-Mail Website
Guest Editor
Natural Sciences Department, Metropolitan State University, Saint Paul, MN 55106-5000, USA
Interests: dispersal; migration; entomology; life history evolution; biological control; invasion ecology
Special Issues, Collections and Topics in MDPI journals

Special Issue Information

Dear Colleagues,

Due both to their relative ease as experimental subjects and their overwhelming share of animal biodiversity, insects have proven to be excellent models for studies of evolutionary and behavioral ecology. The editor of this Special Issue welcomes submissions of both original research and synthetic reviews on the following topics in insect ecology: life history evolution, symbiosis, dispersal and migration, sexual selection and mating systems, foraging and defense, sex ratios, resistance evolution, intra- and interspecific communication, parental care, and sociobiology. Applied entomological research articles are welcomed so long as they are rooted in a basic understanding of one or more of the above fields.

Dr. Mark Asplen
Guest Editor

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 100 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for announcement on this website.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a single-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Ecologies is an international peer-reviewed open access quarterly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 1000 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.

Keywords

  • Evolutionary ecology
  • Behavioral ecology
  • Life history evolution
  • Sociobiology
  • Symbiosis
  • Sexual selection

Published Papers (1 paper)

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Research

11 pages, 1288 KiB  
Article
No Effect of Early Adult Experience on the Development of Individual Specialization in Host-Searching Cabbage White Butterflies
by Meredith K. Steck and Emilie C. Snell-Rood
Ecologies 2022, 3(1), 1-11; https://doi.org/10.3390/ecologies3010001 - 19 Jan 2022
Viewed by 2082
Abstract
Individuals in a population often use unique subsets of locally available resources, but we do not entirely understand how environmental context shapes the development of these specializations. In this study, we used ovipositing cabbage white butterflies (Pieris rapae) searching for host [...] Read more.
Individuals in a population often use unique subsets of locally available resources, but we do not entirely understand how environmental context shapes the development of these specializations. In this study, we used ovipositing cabbage white butterflies (Pieris rapae) searching for host plants to test the hypothesis that early experience with an abundant resource can lead to later individual specialization. We first exposed naïve butterflies to one of three environments with different relative abundances of host plants of comparable nutritional quality, cabbage and radish. The next day, we observed butterflies from all treatments searching for hosts in a common environment where cabbage and radish were equally abundant. We predicted that the butterflies would preferentially visit the host plant that had been abundant during their previous experience, but instead found that butterflies from all experience treatments visited cabbage, a likely more visually salient host, more often than radish. In this experiment, behavioral plasticity in current conditions outweighed developmental experience in shaping individual resource use. We argue that these butterflies potentially respond to particularly salient search cues and that the discriminability of a resource may lead to specialization bias independent of early life experiences with abundant resources. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Evolutionary and Behavioral Ecology of Insects)
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