Drivers of larval gregariousness in Lepidoptera

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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.