Nutrient availability constrains life history evolution: A comparative study across butterflies

Background/Question/Methods

Resource availability is known to impact organismal development and thus community dynamics. However what is less clear, is how resources impact trait evolution. Ideas from both life history theory and anthropology suggest that nutrient availability may constrain the evolution of traits requiring those nutrients. At the same time, organisms often adapt to their diets over time, suggesting that such constraints may act only over short time scales. We use butterflies as a system to more thoroughly and systematically test these ideas. In particular, we test whether recent or ancient host shifts are correlated with life history variation across over fifty species.

Results/Conclusions

Preliminary data suggest that availability of nitrogen and sodium in host plants can constrain the evolution of neural investment and body size, sometimes over long periods of evolutionary time (>30 million years). These data suggest that dietary history alone can explain some of the variation across species in reproductive rates or survival in new environments.