Publication Date

8-2024

Advisor(s) - Committee Chair

Albert Meier, Keith Philips, Douglas McElroy

Degree Program

Department of Biology

Degree Type

Master of Science

Abstract

Many animals have a survival instinct to flee in response to fire, but do they respond to smoke alone? Many arthropods respond to fire or smoke by moving in the opposite direction (a negative taxis) to obtain shelter. At the species level, taxa that have adapted a behavioral response to fire increase their fitness. This response behavior has been observed in many terrestrial arthropods. Still, the behavior is currently unknown for marine, aquatic, or cave arthropods, which are atypically exposed to smoke or fire. This project assesses how often behavioral adaptation to smoke avoidance may have evolved within Arthropoda. Twenty-two different orders within Arthropoda were used to assess how many times a behavioral response to smoke may have evolved. The data collected was the total amount of time that an individual moved during the control and experimental trials, measured in seconds. Pairwise t-tests were performed on orders and selected families to assess which taxa had a response to smoke. The insect orders that significantly responded to smoke in the experimental trials and included members of the Coleoptera, Lepidoptera, Orthoptera, Plecoptera, Archaeognatha, and Hemiptera. Based on these results, the behavioral trait of responding to smoke seen in an increase in movement is polyphyletic within Arthropoda; six different evolutionary hypotheses were proposed from these results. The most parsimonious hypothesis outside of the Insecta involves two gains of a behavioral adaptation to smoke - in both the Araneae and Opiliones – and is based on earlier studies. In this study, two hypotheses within the Insecta for the evolution of a behavioral response to smoke are equally parsimonious. The first involves one gain in the common ancestor of all insects with a loss in the Paleoptera (old winged insects), while the second involves two separate gains of a response in both the apterygotes (wingless insects) and neopterans (new winged insects).

Disciplines

Biodiversity | Biology | Ecology and Evolutionary Biology | Entomology | Life Sciences

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