Sedgwick Reserve

29 Feb, 04 PM - 14 Apr, 05 PM

Magne here from the Thompson lab at UCSC. I plan to come to Sedgwick for field work again in March 2012. I am in the middle of preparing for field season, and I am planning to return to Sedgwick for additional experiments. This time I will be following up on last year?s experiments on the Greya moths and the Lithophragma host plants and the role of floral volatiles for the interaction. The y-tube experiments were very (extremely) successful and showed that females of both species (G. politella and G. obscura) navigated towards the scent of the local plants (L. cymbalaria). Interestingly, when G. politella females were presented to non-local plants they did not navigate towards them, which implies local adaptation in the preference for floral volatiles. This year I will follow up this experiment by continuing a host plant preference study that I started last year when I let females meet either local or non-local host plants (in the green house) and measured their propensity to use plants of the different species and populations for egg-laying. Results so far show strong preference for the local host, although I need to double the sample before I can draw any statistically significant conclusions. I will also perform a field study on floral scent and whether it changes after pollination - some lepidopterans place egg-deterrent pheromones in the inflorescences of their host plants during egg-laying, and some plants terminates scent signaling after having been pollinated, and I want to try to determine whether this is the case also in the Greya-Lithophragma system.

Visit #28494 @Sedgwick Reserve

Approved

Under Project # 1910 | Research

Geographic mosaics in diversifying plant/insect interactions

faculty - University of California, Santa Cruz

Reservation Members(s)

John Thompson Feb 29 - Apr 14, 2012 (46 days)
John Thompson Feb 29 - Apr 14, 2012 (46 days)
Group of 2 Research Scientist/Post Doc Feb 29 - Apr 14, 2012 (46 days)

Reserve Resources(s) | Create Invoice

Ranch House Not Available 4 Mar 4 - Apr 15, 2012