SNELL-ROOD, Emilie C; University of Arizona, Tucson, AZ: Developmental costs of behavioral plasticity: exploration during oviposition-cue learning in butterflies (Lepidoptera: Pieridae)

Why is there is variation in the degree of phenotypic plasticity within and among species? Somatic selection (e.g., trial-and-error learning) is a developmentally costly mechanism of plasticity as individuals must explore their environment, test a variety of phenotypes, and suffer time, energy, and exposure costs in the process. These costs may impose tradeoffs in the evolution of plasticity. Full-sibling families of Pieris rapae (Lepidoptera: Pieridae) were reared in a common environment and trained to one of two host plants that differed in color and leaf shape. Plastic families, relative to specialized families, were those where siblings learned to correctly land on only the host plant in both of the host plant environments. Na�ve siblings of plastic families should be more likely to suffer 1) behavior-level costs in exploration of a diverse array of non-host plants of different colors and shapes, and 2) tissue-level costs in the amount of neural tissue dedicated to producing and learning a variety of behaviors (e.g., optic lobes, central body, mushroom bodies).