Monarchs sabotage milkweed to acquire toxins, not to disarm plant defence
Betz, A.; Bischoff, R.; Petschenka, G.
Show abstract
Sabotaging milkweed by monarch caterpillars is a textbook example for disarming plant defence. By severing leaf veins, monarchs are thought to prevent toxic latex flow to their feeding site. Here we show that sabotaging by monarch caterpillars is not an avoidance strategy. Instead, caterpillars actively ingest outflowing latex to increase sequestration of toxic latex cardenolides. Comparisons with caterpillars of the related non-sequestering common crow butterfly revealed three lines of evidence supporting our hypothesis. First, monarchs sabotage inconsistently and therefore the behaviour is not mandatory to feed on milkweed, while sabotaging in crows precedes every feeding event. Second, monarchs eagerly drink latex, while crow caterpillars spit out latex during sabotaging. Third, monarchs raised on detached leaves sequestered more cardenolides when latex was supplemented artificially. Hence, we conclude, that monarchs converted the "sabotage to avoid" strategy of their relatives into a "sabotage to consume" strategy for acquiring toxins for defence.
Matching journals
The top 3 journals account for 50% of the predicted probability mass.
Similar papers in this journal
Similar papers in this journal
- Common resistance mechanisms are deployed by plants against sap-feeding herbivorous insects: insights from a meta-analysis and systematic review 92%
- Fertility costs of cryptic viral infections in a model social insect 92%
- Individual, but not population asymmetries, are modulated by social environment and genotype in Drosophila melanogaster 91%
Similar papers in this journal
- Chemical signals act as the main reproductive barrier between sister and mimetic Heliconius butterflies 92%
- Light environment influences mating behaviours during the early stages of divergence in tropical butterflies 92%
- Repeated loss of variation in insect ovary morphology highlights the role of developmental constraint in life-history evolution 91%
Similar papers in this journal
- Brochosomes as an antireflective camouflage coating for leafhoppers 94%
- Sending mixed signals: convergent iridescence and divergent chemical signals in sympatric sister-species of Amazonian butterflies 93%
- Constitutive activation of cellular immunity underlies the evolution of resistance to infection 92%
"Similar papers" are the closest papers from that journal in the model's embedding space. They show what the match is built on, but the ranking comes mostly from a classifier over the whole training set, not from these examples alone.