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Since this paper is finally fully out, I thought I'd do a bit of a thread on the story behind it and our (w/ @BeesAndBaking) results. So here's a thread about international moths, accidentally breaking your advisor's projects, and the importance of reading widely. (1/15) https://twitter.com/BeesAndBaking/status/1280906654993743872
First of all, this project predates me in the lab. I don't know if you caught the little tidbit that each of these populations are 5 years old, but when I can to the Boots Lab in 2016 these moth serial passage lines had already survived a cross-continental move with Lewis. (2/15)
So, Mike (our PI) presented the project as "you and Lewis can assay these rn and you'll have a nice simple publication to start your PhD with". Jokes on you Mike, of course it took us 2 years to get our acts together to do the assays (with help from B2B UG Yazmin Haro) (3/15)
And then, of course, when we finally looked at the data, all of the trends were the exact opposite of what we were expecting to find. We'd broken the trade-off that Mike had been working on since his PhD. Oops. (4/15)
Well, let's back up a second. What is this trade-off? Back with Boots and Begun 1993, the lab started showing that our plodia interpunctella moths could evolve resistance to baculovirus, but they did so at the cost of longer development time. (5/15)
This was shown at multiple resource levels (Boots 2011), amongst naturally varying populations (Boots 1995), and with inbred lines (Bartlett et al 2018). These papers all showed a consistent result that higher resistance=longer development time. (6/15)
So we set out to test the symmetry or tightness of this trade-off. Rather than selecting on resistance and seeing what happened to development time, we selected on development time to see what would happen to resistance. We were kinda expecting the trade-off to stay clean. (7/15)
Of course it didn't. I just tried to get y'all some screenshots of Lewis and I panicking over that, but all our messages from that time are all about how my mom was trying to give me fashion advice for my first conference from her 1980s marketing days. (8/15)
Also, Lewis and I don't exactly panic, lol. Realistically, that conversation looked something like Lewis: "fuck, why couldn't this just work out. I'm over it", Me: "But this gives us so much room to have all sorts of weird fun with the discussion!!" (9/15)
So, luckily, I had just finished my qualifying exam where some of my readings were on insect immunity and had been thinking about developmental versus humoral resistance. And we also thought there might be trade-offs in other traits, so we had some ideas to explain things (10/15)
So when we went to Mike to be like "oops, Mike, we broke your PhD", we could at least also be like "but actually there's some fun, cool reasons why that might be". (11/15)
I think Mike's response was something like "well, this could have been a boring, failed project, but y'all have managed to tell some interesting story about it so go ahead and write it up to try for a decent journal." (12/15)
So we did. And then with the helps of Lewis' and my committees and an email to an old undergrad mentor in the life-history evolution world to talk about similar reciprocal selection experiments, we got together a very interesting paper. (13/15)
I think the most interesting bit of the paper is how, with polygenic traits, different alleles affecting those traits might have different correlations with other traits. The set of genes that respond to selection therefore depends on the selective environment. (14/15)
This does not disprove the concept of evolution by trade-off in any one environment, but does lead to avenues where complex environmental and selective variation might lead to different evolutionary trajectories. (15/15)
So there ya go all. Go read (and cite plz 
) our paper, especially if you are interested in trade-offs, experimental evolution, resistance, and the like. (16/15)
) our paper, especially if you are interested in trade-offs, experimental evolution, resistance, and the like. (16/15)
