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. Understanding how species respond and adapt to anthropogenic changes is critical to the development of effective conservation policy and practice. 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. Insects and moths in particular represent a tractable taxa to investigate these changes, as they are functionally diverse, well represented in collections, and found across a wide range of environments. One key way that moths can adapt to environmental changes is through changes in morphology. For example, reductions in moth body and eye size, and changes in wing shape over time 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 over 1 million insect specimens and accompanying collectors’ notebooks, dating back to the early 1800s. This collection is an important 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 utilise the newly acquired state-of-the-art technology for 3D specimen digitisation and apply novel techniques to quantify changes in hawkmoth morphology over 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.