Many insect populations become darker at high elevations and high latitudes. Despite absence of empirical evidence, it is commonly believed that melanism allows more efficient basking by insects in sunlight, thereby raising body temperature and increasing activity. Variation in melanism within a single population of alpine Colias sulphur butterflies (Lepidoptera:Pieridae) allowed determination of the advantage, in cold environments, for this characteristic. Alternative hypotheses relating the effect of melanism to fecundity, predation, diel activity, and seasonal survivorship were tested by field and laboratory observation and experiment. At low temperature, melanistic females are more fecund. A balancing advantage for light coloured females does not exist at high temperatures. Dark individuals suffer lower predation rates at high altitude than do light individuals; the opposite is not true at low elevation. Duration of diel activity is markedly extended for darker butterflies under cool conditions, but only slightly for light individuals during warm sunny periods. Melanistic individuals are able to prolong the duration of activity for feeding, mate location, oviposition and escape from predation under cold conditions. This appears to the prime benefit for melanism in this population. This is the first demonstration, in a natural population, of the benefit of alpine melanism in insects. / Science, Faculty of / Zoology, Department of / Graduate

Data bearing on the evolution, environmental control and genetic basis of pupal color dimorphism was presented or discussed for six species of swallowtail betterflies. Papilla glauces and P. cresphontes produce only brown pupae while P. polyxenes, P. troilus, Battus philenor and Eurytides marcellus produce both green and brown pupae. Natural pupation sites of the species were located and results were generally consistent with the hypothesis of Sheppard (1958) which relates the evolution of the environmentally-cued dimorphism to environmental variation. The relative importance of texture, color and photo-period as environmental cues controlling the expression of pupal color was investigated and the results were discussed in relation to differences in the pupation sites of the species. The genetic basis of pupal color was investigated in E. marcellus by selecting for an increase in the tendency of larvae to produce green or brown pupae. The results were found to be consistent with the genetic basis of the trait as proposed by Hazel (1977). It was concluded that the primary factor responsible for the evolution of the dimorphism and the environmental cues which control its expression is nature of the pupation sites that a species utilizes. / Ph. D.

Models of sensory processing have historically abstracted underlying biological circuits, due to unknown connectivity and/or complexity. In contrast, the use of tractable and anatomically well-characterized model organisms such as the fruit fly Drosophila melanogaster allows us to utilize biological constraints in models of sensory processing to understand underlying circuit mechanisms and make more accurate predictions. This approach has been used to dissect motion vision circuits, but investigations into color vision - a salient visual feature for many animals - have been limited. Here, we investigate the circuit mechanisms of the early color circuit of the fruit fly and assess its information processing capabilities. Using in vivo two-photon calcium imaging and genetic manipulations, we measure the chromatic tuning properties of photoreceptor axons and their primary targets in the medulla neuropil. At the level of photoreceptor axons, we show that opponent processes are the result of a dual mechanism - a direct pathway specific to insect physiology and an indirect pathway found across the animal kingdom. Both pathways are necessary to decorrelate incoming signals and efficiently represent chromatic information. We built an anatomically constrained model that is able to quantitatively reproduce these color opponent responses without fitting synaptic weights. Instead, we used electron-microscopy-derived synaptic count, an anatomically defined measure, as a proxy for synaptic weight, thereby linking structure to function. Downstream of photoreceptors, we find that neurons shift their tuning and become highly selective for particular directions in color space - similar to “hue-selective” neurons in primate cortex. To achieve this selectivity, these neurons require input from all types of photoreceptors and an interneuron that determines the neuron's preferred chromatic direction. We extended our anatomically constrained model to incorporate these downstream neurons and are able to predict their responses, qualitatively and quantitatively.In summary, the detailed reconstruction of the fly circuit anatomy predicts the mechanisms of multiple stages of color information processing and allows us to infer functional roles for each part of the circuit. The circuit motifs, we uncover, are shared across species and hint at convergent mechanisms that underlie the transformation from an opponent neural code to a hue selective code.