Drivers of larval gregariousness in Lepidoptera

在各种各样的动物身上，群居行为已经进化了很多次。群居现象的盛行引发了许多有趣的进化问题；例如，竞争与合作之间的冲突是如何平衡的？社交行为的好处是什么？费用是多少？但这也引出了许多机械问题：动物如何感知彼此？它们如何跟踪彼此的行为？这个项目旨在利用新热带蝴蝶的不同部落Heliconiini作为研究系统来解决这些问题。幼虫的群居行为在多个独立的谱系中进化，在某些情况下，密切相关的物种在产卵和幼虫行为上差异很大。该项目的主要目标是：i)制定协议，准确地量化不同物种和幼虫的群居行为。ii)进行比较分析，以探索群居行为、色彩、捕食者回避和寄主植物形态之间的相互作用。iii)进行实验，以确定群居物种使用什么感官线索来维持群体凝聚力。iv)使用现有的比较基因组学和新的神经转录数据来确定可能有助于幼虫行为的候选基因。

Gregarious behaviour has evolved many times in a wide range of animals. The prevalence ofgregariousness poses many interesting evolutionary questions; For example, how is the conflictbetween competition and cooperation balanced? What are the advantages of social behaviour? Andwhat are the costs? But it also leads to many mechanistic questions; how do animals sense each other?How do they track each other's behaviour?This project aims to tackle these questions using Heliconiini, a diverse tribe of Neotropical butterflies,as a study system. Gregarious larval behaviour has evolved in multiple independent lineages, and insome cases closely related species differ dramatically in egg laying and larval behaviour. The primarygoals of the project are to:i) Develop protocols to accurately quantify gregarious behaviour across species and larvalstages.ii) Conduct comparative analyses to explore the interactions between gregarious behaviour,colouration, predator avoidance, and host plant morphology.iii) Perform experiments to establish what sensory cues gregarious species use to maintain groupcohesion.iv) Use available comparative genomics and new neurotranscriptomic data to identify candidategenes that may contribute to larval behaviour.