Host plant phytochemicals influence life history of butterfly Papilio polytes apparently effecting recent host shift
Mode of Presentation: Poster
Conference Name: Congress of the European Society for Evolutionary Biology (ESEB 2019)
Year: 2019
Area: Entomofauna, Chemical Ecology
Authors: Sarika Baidya, Dipendra Nath Basu, Souparno Roy and Arjan Basu Roy
Abstract
Studies on the adaptive networks of insect-plant interactions showed that biology of these herbivores is often integrated in several ways with their host plants. Evolutionary history of such interactions revealed patterns of co-evolution among plant families and phytophagous insects including butterflies. In widely distributed species evolution of polyphagy and host shifts were critical adaptive strategies to compensate scarcity of nutritional resources across different habitats. Similarly, Papilio polytes, a butterfly widely distributed across one of the most heterogeneous landscape of oriental region also evolved polyphagy. We conducted experiments to understand how P. polytes adapted on its different host plants. We have chosen two common host plants of P. polytes viz. Citrus limon and Murraya koenigii, and a recently recorded host plant Ravenia spectabilis. We did phytochemical analyses of the leaves and studied life history traits as adaptive characters in P. polytes populations reared separately on these host plants. In these populations, we found (1) significant differences in nutritive factors and other metabolites among these three host plants, (2) among the three population major shifts in early stage durations and final larval instar weight, (3) different oviposition preference of females on these host plants and (4) strong correlation between host plant phytochemicals and all these life history traits. Overall, our results suggest that host plants greatly impact on the life history traits of the butterfly which reflects on differential adaptive efficiency of the butterfly seemingly influencing recent host shift.