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University of Tennessee, Knoxville
Faculty Publications and Other Works -- Ecology and Evolutionary Biology
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Not All Toxic Butterflies Are Toxic: High Intra- And Interspecific Variation In Sequestration In Subtropical Swallowtails, Romina D. Dimarco, James A. Fordyce
Not All Toxic Butterflies Are Toxic: High Intra- And Interspecific Variation In Sequestration In Subtropical Swallowtails, Romina D. Dimarco, James A. Fordyce
Faculty Publications and Other Works -- Ecology and Evolutionary Biology
Many herbivorous insects make use of plant secondary metabolites by consuming and storing these toxic compounds in their body tissue or integument, thereby obtaining chemical defense against their natural enemies. Swallowtail butterflies in the tribe Troidini (Papilionidae) sequester toxic alkaloids (aristolochic acids, AAs) from their host plants in the genus Aristolochia. Troidine butterflies have been a model group for development of theory on host plant chemical sequestration, but most studies on this group have been limited to a single species in North America. These studies have led, in part, to the paradigm that troidine butterflies are toxic, thereby explaining …