The Evolution of Trade-offs Between Growth and Predator Avoidance

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McPeek 9707787 Almost all organisms must find enough food for themselves while trying not to become food for another organism. These are also often conflicting objectives; the properties that make an organism better at finding food often makes it worse at avoiding predators. Although this tradeoff in abilities is commonly observed in many taxa, the underlying phenotypic architecture that generates this fundamental trade-off is poorly understood. In this proposal the PI will describe research to explore the properties of organisms generating such a trade-off between growth and predator avoidance in larval damselflies (Insecta), and to reconstruct how these properties have evolved as this taxon has shifted between habitats with different predators and different resource availabilities. The PI will conduct studies of four different organismal properties to explore the underlying causes of this trade-off, including differences in (1) movement and activity, (2) burst swimming ability and anaerobic physiological capacities, (3) digestive efficiency, and (4) aerobic metabolic capacity. Analyses will test hypotheses about the functional couplings among characters and the evolution of these functional couplings. Examining how these functional couplings have evolved provides valuable insights into the constraints affecting taxa as they adapt to natural and anthropogenically-induced environmental change (e.g., natural habitat shifts, climate change, habitat degradation).