Introductions of novel plant species can disturb the historical resource environment of herbivorous insects, resulting in strong selection to either adopt or exclude the novel host. However, an adaptive response depends on heritable genetic variation for preference or performance within the targeted

Organisms must often make developmental decisions without complete information about future conditions. This uncertainty for example, about the duration of conditions favorable for growth can favor bet-hedging strategies. Here, we investigated the causes of life-cycle variation in Osmia iridis, a be

AbstractWarm temperatures are required for insect flight. Consequently, warming could benefit many high‐latitude and high‐altitude insects by increasing opportunities for foraging or oviposition. However, warming can also alter species interactions, including interactions with natural enemies, makin

Identifying forces that affect population dynamics can allow us to better understand the

Plant reproductive success is often influenced by not only direct effects of flower-eating herbivores (florivores) consuming floral tissues, but also the indirect effects of pollinator visitation. Previous literature suggests that florivore damage can negatively influence pollinator visitation, cons

Evolution by natural selection is influenced by an organism’s environment. Biodiversity, an aspect of the biotic environment, is rapidly changing due to anthropogenic activity, so its impacts on selection must be better understood. In this study, the effects of diversity on selection for an insect r

With climate change threatening a wide variety of organisms and ecosystems, expanding our knowledge of how they will respond is vital for making predictions and conservation decisions. One important group of organisms impacted by climate change is the wild bees, which provide an essential ecosystem

Many specialist herbivores eat foods that are apparently low quality. The compensatory benefits of a poor diet may include protection from natural enemies. Several bee lineages specialize on pollen of the plant family Asteraceae, which is known to be a poor-quality food. Here we tested the hypothesi

AbstractSurveys of bumble bees and the plants they visit, carried out in 1974 near the Rocky Mountain Biological Laboratory in Colorado, were repeated in 2007, thus permitting the testing of hypotheses arising from observed climate change over the intervening 33‐yr period. As expected, given an incr

AbstractPlant species can influence the pollination and reproductive success of coflowering neighbors that share pollinators. Because some individual pollinators habitually forage in particular areas, it is also possible that plant species could influence the pollination of neighbors that bloom late

Background: Trait evolution and plasticity are expected to interactively influence responses to climate change, but rapid changes in and increased variability of temperature may limit evolutionary responses. We use historical specimens to document changes in the size and thermoregulatory traits of a

Flight is a central determinant of fitness in butterflies and other insects, but it is restricted to a limited range of body temperatures. To achieve these body temperatures, butterflies use a combination of morphological, behavioural and physiological mechanisms. Here, we used common garden (withou

The findings are inconsistent with the hypothesis that thermoregulatory behavior inhibits the geographic divergence of physiological traits in mobile stages, and suggest that sessile stages may evolve similar heat tolerances in different environments due to microclimatic variability or evolutionary

Miller-Struttmann et al. (2015) suggest that, in a North American alpine ecosystem, reduced flower abundance due to climate change has driven the evolution of shorter tongues in two bumble bee species. We accept the evidence that tongue length has decreased, but are unconvinced by the adaptive expla

Synthesizing papers from the last two years, generalizations about the fingerprints of climate change on insects' population dynamics and phenology are examined to show that knowledge of effects ofClimate change is still biased by organism and geographic region, and to some extent by scale of climat

Heidi Joan MacLean: ADAPTATION TO CLIMATE AND CLIMATE CHANGE IN ROCKY MOUNTAIN BUTTERFLIES: MORPHOLOGY, PHYSIOLOGY AND BEHAVIOR (Under the direction of Joel G. Kingsolver and Lauren B. Buckley)

Native Bombus species are in decline in the United States. Since pollinators are such integral species in a system, the extinction of a single Bombus species could potentially have far reaching consequences on crop production and plant reproduction necessary for species diversity ad agriculture. How