Abstract
Understanding how animals make use of environmental information to guide behavior is a fundamental problem in the field of neuroscience. Similarly, the field of ecology seeks to understand the role of behavior in shaping interactions between organisms at various levels of organization, including population-, community- and even ecosystem-level scales. Together, the newly emerged field of “Neuroecology” seeks to unravel this fundamental question by studying both the function of neurons at many levels of the sensory pathway and the interactions between organisms and their natural environment. The interactions between herbivorous insects and their host plants are ideal examples of Neuroecology given the strong ecological and evolutionary forces and the underlying physiological and behavioral mechanisms that shaped these interactions. In this review we focus on an exemplary herbivorous insect within the Lepidoptera, the giant sphinx moth Manduca sexta, as much is known about the natural behaviors related to host plant selection and the involved neurons at several level of the sensory pathway. We also discuss how herbivore-induced plant odorants and secondary metabolites in floral nectar in turn can affect moth behavior, and the underlying neural mechanisms.
Highlights
We thank Drs John Hildebrand and Kristin Scott for their support and encouragement, and to the two reviewers for their comments and suggestions that greatly improved this manuscript
We propose that all these issues by necessity need to be investigated in an appropriate Neuroecology framework
Along with a deep understanding of the relationships of organisms with their natural environment, we believe that in the near future genomic tools available to many insect species will permit a deeper and more complete understanding of how the insect nervous system produces adaptive behavior
Summary
Reviewed by: Zainulabeuddin Syed, University of Notre Dame, USA Marcus Carl Stensmyr, Lund University, Sweden. The neural bases of host plant selection in a Neuroecology framework. The newly emerged field of “Neuroecology” seeks to unravel this fundamental question by studying both the function of neurons at many levels of the sensory pathway and the interactions between organisms and their natural environment. The interactions between herbivorous insects and their host plants are ideal examples of Neuroecology given the strong ecological and evolutionary forces and the underlying physiological and behavioral mechanisms that shaped these interactions. In this review we focus on an exemplary herbivorous insect within the Lepidoptera, the giant sphinx moth Manduca sexta, as much is known about the natural behaviors related to host plant selection and the involved neurons at several level of the sensory pathway. We discuss how herbivore-induced plant odorants and secondary metabolites in floral nectar in turn can affect moth behavior, and the underlying neural mechanisms
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