Alexander Schäpers

Stockholm University | SU · Department of Zoology

Reproducibility is a scientific cornerstone. Many recent studies, however, describe a reproducibility crisis and call for assessments of reproducibility across scientific domains. Here, we explore the reproducibility of a classic ecological experiment-that of assessing female host plant preference and acceptance in phytophagous insects, a group in...

Herbivorous insects specialized on a narrow set of plants are believed to be better adapted to their specific hosts. This hypothesis is supported by observations of herbivorous insect species with a broader diet breadth which seemingly pay a cost through decreased oviposition accuracy. Despite many studies investigating female oviposition behavior,...

Searching for resources is often a challenging task, especially for small organisms such as insects. Complex stimuli have to be extracted from the environment and translated into a relevant behavioral output. A first step in this process is to investigate the relative roles of the different senses during search for various resources. While the role...

In phytophagous insects such as butterflies, there is an evolutionary trend toward specialization in host plant use. One contributing mechanism for this pattern may be found in female host search behavior. Since search attention is limited, generalist females searching for hosts for oviposition may potentially increase their search efficacy by aimi...

An ovipositing insect experiences many sensory challenges during her search for a suitable host plant. These sensory challenges become exceedingly pronounced when host range increases, as larger varieties of sensory inputs have to be perceived and processed in the brain. Neural capacities can be exceeded upon information overload, inflicting costs...

Parasite-host and insect-plant research have divergent traditions despite the fact that most phytophagous insects live parasitically on their host plants. In parasitology it is a traditional assumption that parasites are typically highly specialized; cospeciation between parasites and hosts is a frequently expressed default expectation. Insect-plan...

It is generally known that insects use visual, olfactory and gustatory cues to find and evaluate targets such as food sources or host plants, but the particular role of each of the sensory modalities in the search process is less clear. One trait affecting the efficiency and accuracy of the host search process is host plant breadth. For example, sp...

Olfaction is in many species the most important sense, essential for food search, mate finding, and predator avoidance. Butterflies have been considered a microsmatic group of insects that mainly rely on vision due to their diurnal lifestyle. However, an emerging number of studies indicate that butterflies indeed use the sense of smell for locating...

Butterflies are believed to use mainly visual cues when searching for food and oviposition sites despite that their olfactory system is morphologically similar to their nocturnal relatives, the moths. The olfactory ability in butterflies has, however, not been thoroughly investigated. Therefore, we performed the first study of odour representation...

Recent studies have examined the ecological and evolutionary bases for variation in animal personality. However, only a few such studies have examined how foraging parameters are influenced by different personality domains. In wild ungulates, the trade-off between the time spent on food intake and antipredator behaviour differs between individuals,...