Meeting Abstract
Nutritional stress can decrease fecundity, but it is unclear how such life history changes interact with behavioral strategies. On one hand, nutritionally stressed individuals may be more choosy to maximize the fitness of the few offspring they can afford to produce; on the other hand, these individuals may not have the resources to invest in costly choice behavior. Choosiness during oviposition exhibits a trade-off with fecundity in satiated butterflies, suggesting that choosiness is costly under normal conditions. We therefore hypothesized that poor nutrition in juvenile and/or adult environments could reduce choosiness in these insects. To test this hypothesis, we manipulated nutrition during the larval and adult stages of the butterfly Pieris rapae. Adult females were allowed to lay eggs in a host plant assay in which some plants had conspecific models previously found to deter egg-laying. Females from poor-nutrition adult treatments laid fewer eggs and were less choosy than individuals from high-nutrition adult treatments. There were no effects of larval nutrition. To better understand why we found no effect of larval nutrition, we surveyed the effects of variation in larval nutrition on a suite of life-history traits in a follow-up experiment. Taken together, our data suggest that nutritional stress can have major consequences– not only reproductive costs, but also impaired decision-making‒ potentially because egg production and information processing are both metabolically costly.
