You are what your mother eats: understanding mother-offspring interactions in tsetse vectors of disease.

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How does maternal malnutrition impact offspring health? While this question has long been relevantin the field of human public health, little is known about transgenerational effects of food stress andits impact for offspring quality in disease vectors. This project will focus on the link between maternalnutritional stress and offspring quality in an important vector, the tsetse fly. Tsetse transmit sleepingsickness in humans and nagana in livestock, causing great societal and economic concern across subSaharan Africa. They are unusual disease vectors: females give birth to single, live offspring the samesize as the mother. Thus, understanding maternal investment in this species is key to predicting howchanges in their diet will impact tsetse populations and the risk of tsetse-borne disease. The studentwill use cutting-edge methods of stable isotope marker tracing to follow the fate of macronutrients(fat, proteins and lipids) from mothers to offspring in live-bearing tsetse. They will manipulate the dietof tsetse by providing bloodmeals which mimic nutritionally stressed hosts, and compare how mothersallocate nutrients across generations with those given control meals. They will also examine how suchallocation decisions depend on the quality of the diet offspring themselves experience. In tandem, thestudent will analyse field samples collected in Zimbabwe to investigate how the levels of nutritionalstress in the laboratory reflect those observed in the wild. The student will also develop newevolutionary and physiological models of how mothers adjust their allocation towards their ownsurvival or that of their offspring under food stress, and how this balance depends on conflict betweenmothers and young. By collaborating with theoreticians in the University of Bristol and the SouthAfrican Centre for Epidemiological Modelling and Analysis, the student will have the opportunity tointegrate these models into simulations to test how such maternal allocation shapes tsetse populationresponses to environmental change under conditions of drought and malnutrition.