Morphological Determinants of Flight Performance and Fitnessin Pieris Butterflies

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Many insects, including butterflies, use evasive flight as a means of avoiding potential predators like birds and spiders. Many aspects of wing size and shape, body size and shape, and flight behavior are correlated with successful predator avoidance, but it is not clear what specific aspects of size and shape actually determine evasive flight ability and escape from predation. IN the proposed research, we shall experimentally manipulate wing size and body mass in Western White butterflies to test two competing hypotheses about the morphological determinants of predator- evasion: wing-loading (the ratio of body mass to wing area) and flight muscle ratio (the ratio of flight muscle mass to total body mass). By doing these manipulations in both the lab and the field, we shall determine how wing-loading and flight muscle ratio affect flight performance, predation rates, and survival and reproduction.