Are you what you eat? The role of macronutrients in shaping adaptation to extreme environmental change in interacting species

The increasing rate at which climate change is occurring, and the frequency and magnitude of change, means that environments are unpredictable, they change abruptly, and they can be extreme. The focus of climate research is often on temperature extremes, but it is increasingly recognised that the interaction between different kinds of environmental change, such as food quality, may determine a species’ capacity to adapt. Understanding how species respond to these rapid changes is a key question in ecology, evolution and conservation biology because species face an increasing risk of extinction. Of particular concern is how trophic interactions will respond to environmental change because these interactions, such as predators and their prey, are fundamental to ecological food webs, and they are critical for ecosystem functioning and ecosystem services, such as pollination and pest control.

Proteins, lipids and carbohydrates are macronutrients that underpin an organism’s critical life history traits, including development, body size and reproduction. In the context of climate warming, increasing temperature affects an organism’s nutritional requirements because proteins may limit the effects of heat stress in insects, while lipids may help them to resist desiccation. Climate warming also changes the nutritional quality of primary producers, which further affect their herbivore consumers. How these complex changes in nutritional quality affect higher trophic levels, such as predators and parasitoids, is not well understood, but they may have important implications for extinction risk and community structure.

This project will be based in the School of Biology at the University of Leeds and combine the complementary skills of the Sait (https://biologicalsciences.leeds.ac.uk/school-of-biology/staff/132/dr-steven-sait) and Duncan (https://biologicalsciences.leeds.ac.uk/school-of-biology/staff/59/dr-elizabeth-duncan) labs to amalgamate ecological and mechanistic approaches to address these critical gaps in knowledge. The project aligns with current research projects in their labs, as well as their wider networks of scientists working on climate change science. The project will employ a well-established laboratory system (Sait et al. 2000) to explore the effects of changes in temperature that mimic future climate change scenarios, and how they interact with macronutrient availability in an insect host-parasitoid trophic interaction.

Recent work in the Sait lab has shown that different frequencies of temperature fluctuations, coupled with variation in resource availability, can cause phenotypic changes that dramatically affect host-parasitoid population dynamics (Mugabo et al. 2019), while humidity may act to moderate the effects of extreme temperatures (Li et al. 2024). Little is known about the role of macronutrients underpinning these responses, but this is a critical missing piece of the puzzle. Using this lab system, the project will combine measures of individual host and parasitoid life history traits with population dynamics to understand how the host and parasitoid adapt to changing environments within and across multiple generations.

Example references :

1) Sait SM et al. (2000), Nature, https://doi.org/10.1038/35013045

2) Mugabo M et al. (2019) Journal of Animal Ecology, https://doi.org/10.1111/1365-2656.13069

3) Li D et al. (2024) Ecology and Evolution, http://dx.doi.org/10.1002/ece3.70047

4) Duncan, EJ et al. (2022) Insects, https://doi.org/10.3390/insects13020110