BRC-BIO: Integrating within- and across- generation plasticity to temperature variation to inform eco-evolutionary responses to temperature variation

About This Grant

While genes significantly contribute to the traits that plants, animals, and humans possess as adults – for example, body size and metabolic rate— many traits are also flexible. Throughout their life, organisms can adjust certain traits to better meet the demands of their current environment, which might be particularly important in environments experiencing rapid rates of change. Environmental cues that guide beneficial trait adjustments can stem from developmental conditions, the influence of parents, and even the environment faced by previous generations. Ultimately, this can influence an organism’s ability to survive and reproduce. However, research often examines each of these influences in isolation, which ignores how they might interact to create complex, combined effects. This research aims to better understand how multiple forces (i.e., developmental conditions, parental effects, and grandparental effects) shape body size, metabolic rate, and reproduction in Vanessa cardui butterflies. V. cardui is a nearly globally distributed butterfly that pollinates hundreds of different plants in both natural and agricultural systems. This research will reveal how pollinators might cope with rapid environmental changes, helping to safeguard food security, ecosystem health, and biodiversity. Importantly, this project will engage hundreds of undergraduate students in research, bolstering the science and technology workforce, and providing students with the experiences necessary to pursue professional degrees in health, biomedical sciences, and natural resources. Phenotypic plasticity can aid organismal responses to rapid environmental change, and often, an individual’s phenotype is shaped by multiple sources of plasticity. However, contributions of plasticity to phenotype are usually studied in isolation, ignoring the potential for emergent phenotypic outcomes that stem from interactions among types of plasticity. The proposed research will fill this knowledge gap by quantifying the individual and interactive effects of three sources of plasticity: developmental plasticity, parental effects, and transgenerational plasticity to changing temperatures in Vanessa cardui butterflies. Impacts to thermal sensitivity of metabolism – the slope of the temperature metabolic rate function – will be assessed since this trait dictates energy budgets in fluctuating environments. Researchers will assess the contributions from each type of plasticity to phenotype via structural equation models, and as a safeguard, in silico simulations will be used to isolate phenotypic outcomes due to plasticity versus rapid evolution. The researchers will explore ecdysteroids, a broad class of insect hormones, as a potential mechanism of plasticity in this system. Together, this research will uncover the dynamics of interacting sources of plasticity and begin to reveal underlying mechanisms, both of which are critically needed to predict eco-evolutionary responses to environmental change. This award will enhance research capacity by training over 200 undergraduates in research techniques in a vertically integrated course-based undergraduate research experience (VIP-CURE). This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.