Abstract
Individuals in a population often use unique subsets of locally available resources, but we do not entirely understand how environmental context shapes the development of these specializations. In this study, we used ovipositing cabbage white butterflies (Pieris rapae) searching for host plants to test the hypothesis that early experience with an abundant resource can lead to later individual specialization. We first exposed naïve butterflies to one of three environments with different relative abundances of host plants of comparable nutritional quality, cabbage and radish. The next day, we observed butterflies from all treatments searching for hosts in a common environment where cabbage and radish were equally abundant. We predicted that the butterflies would preferentially visit the host plant that had been abundant during their previous experience, but instead found that butterflies from all experience treatments visited cabbage, a likely more visually salient host, more often than radish. In this experiment, behavioral plasticity in current conditions outweighed developmental experience in shaping individual resource use. We argue that these butterflies potentially respond to particularly salient search cues and that the discriminability of a resource may lead to specialization bias independent of early life experiences with abundant resources.
Highlights
Resource use is an important component of most ecological and evolutionary processes
Butterflies foraging in environments where both hosts were abundant exhibited a higher probability of landing on cabbage than in environments where radish was abundant (B = 0.856, p < 0.001). These results indicate that the butterflies were more likely to land on cabbage as it increased in abundance in the environment (Table 1, Figure 2—day 1), confirming that our environmental manipulations provided the butterflies with different experiences with host plants
It was found that experience with an abundant resource does not necessarily lead to intra-population variation in individual resource use
Summary
Resource use is an important component of most ecological and evolutionary processes. Individuals may specialize in specific resources, using only a fraction of the population niche width [1]. Understanding the causes of such intraspecific variability in resource use is relevant to understanding ecological interactions [8,9], ecosystem functioning [10] and evolutionary dynamics [11]. Inter-individual variation in resource use can sometimes be explained by age, sex, or morphology [12,13,14], but there is still variation in resource use specialization within these categories [15,16,17]. It is quite possible that individual variation in an ecological context could explain this further variation in individual specialization [18]. This research builds on recent efforts to begin to understand how experience shapes the development and maintenance of individual specialization [2,19]
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