Image: Drawer of Hawkmoths from the University Museum of Zoology’s Insect Collection. Photo Tiffany Ki
How has the morphology of moths altered in response to anthropogenic change over the past two centuries?
Supervisor: Prof Edgar Turner
Co-supervisor: Dr Tiffany Ki
Over the past two centuries, anthropogenic impacts on biodiversity globally have increased markedly. In response to these changes, species have shifted their distribution or adapted. Understanding how species respond to anthropogenic changes is critical to the development of effective conservation policy and practice. One key way that species can adapt to environmental changes is through morphological adaptation. Museum collections represent a vast storehouse of biodiversity data spanning the past few centuries, including fully preserved specimens, which provide a unique opportunity to examine and quantify changes in morphology of species over time. For example, using these data, we can test for reductions in body and eye size, and changes in wing shape over time, which have been suggested as responses to climatic warming, light pollution and habitat fragmentation. Over the past decade, there have been significant advances in the digitisation of museum specimens and a proliferation in technologies developed to extract information from museum collections. The University Museum of Zoology (Cambridge) holds >1 million insect specimens and accompanying collectors’ notebooks, dating back to the early 1800s. This collection is a rare repository of historical insect data at specific locations across time, providing invaluable long-term time series. Focusing on UK hawkmoths in the Cambridge collection (flexible depending on student’s interests), this project will apply novel techniques to quantify changes in hawkmoth morphology across time. Using historical environmental data, the project will examine how morphological changes relate to known changes in climate, land-use and light pollution across space and time.
Type of work
The student will digitise the UK hawkmoth collection of the Museum of Zoology, gaining experience in specimen handling and digitisation. The student will make use of recent developments in automated methods to extract morphological measurements from digital images. Finally, the student will use novel statistical methods of modelling species changes across time from museum collections, to assess the impacts of known environmental change on species.
Importance of the area of research concerned
Understanding long-term biodiversity change is crucial to better assess the impacts of continued anthropogenic threats and inform conservation. However, most biodiversity datasets only span the past 40 years, with major anthropogenic impacts pre-dating this period. Museum collections represent an invaluable resource to investigate long-term biodiversity change, and this study will focus on examining the impact of anthropogenic change (climate, land-use and artificial light) on the morphology of moth species and communities over time. Findings will quantify any differences in the capacity of species and communities to respond, informing prioritisation of conservation action amongst species and sites.
References
Meineke, E. K., Davies, T. J., Daru, B. H., & Davis, C. C. (2018). Biological collections for understanding biodiversity in the Anthropocene. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological Sciences, 374(1763). https://doi.org/10.1098/rstb.2017.0386
Kharouba, H. M.,Lewthwaite, J. M. M., Guralnick, R., Kerr, J. T., & Vellend, M. (2018). Using insect natural history collections to study global change impacts: challengesand opportunities. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological Sciences, 374(1763).https://doi.org/10.1098/rstb.2017.0405
Ryding, S., Klaassen, M., Tattersall, G. J., Gardner, J. L., & Symonds, M. R. E. (2021). Shape-shifting: changinganimal morphologies as a response to climatic warming. Trends in Ecology & Evolution, 36(11), 1036–1048.