Many species use early life sensory experiences to guide phenotypic plasticity and facilitate decision making during later adult settlement in new habitats or location of suitable resources. However, only some of the available sensory information in the environment is relevant for future decision making and, in addition, it may only be informative during certain times during development. This means that sampling of environmental information that should be retained to adulthood could be limited to certain sensitive periods. In the polyphagous moth Spodoptera littoralis, recent studies have demonstrated that adult females exhibit an innate preference hierarchy for certain plants that can be modulated by olfactory experience during the larval stage. This olfactory-driven phenotypic plasticity requires that information about plant quality is transferred over the full metamorphosis. However, the timing of information acquisition that affects adult behaviour and whether there is a sensitive period for the sensory experience inducing host plant preferences are not known. In this study, we tested whether experience used by adult females during host plant choice was acquired during early or later larval stages and whether adult females can retain larval experience from only one or from sequential feeding events on different plants. We found that only plant feeding experience during the later larval stages induced a host plant preference shift in adult females. Furthermore, our experiments demonstrated that when given an artificial diet in the later larval stage, adult females relied on their innate plant preference hierarchy even if they had feeding experience from a host plant in the early stages. The existence of a sensitive period during late larval stages may be constrained not only by neural development or limitations, but also by ecological factors affecting when the larval experience is most reliable for adult decisions.

中文翻译：

---

通才食草昆虫诱导寄主植物偏好的敏感期

许多物种使用生命早期的感官体验来指导表型可塑性，并在成年后在新栖息地或合适资源位置定居期间促进决策。然而，环境中只有一些可用的感官信息与未来的决策相关，此外，它可能只在开发过程中的某些时间提供信息。这意味着应该保留到成年的环境信息采样可能仅限于某些敏感时期。在多食性蛾 Spodoptera littoralis 中，最近的研究表明，成年雌性对某些植物表现出先天的偏好等级，可以通过幼虫阶段的嗅觉体验进行调节。这种嗅觉驱动的表型可塑性要求在整个变态过程中传递有关植物质量的信息。然而，影响成虫行为的信息获取时间以及感官体验是否存在诱导宿主植物偏好的敏感期尚不清楚。在这项研究中，我们测试了成年雌性在选择寄主植物过程中使用的经验是否是在幼虫早期或后期获得的，以及成年雌性是否可以仅从一种或不同植物的顺序喂养事件中保留幼虫经验。我们发现，只有在幼虫后期的植物喂养经验才能诱导成年雌性寄主植物的偏好转变。此外，我们的实验表明，当在幼虫后期给予人工饲料时，成年雌性依赖于其先天的植物偏好等级，即使它们在早期阶段从寄主植物中获得过喂养经验。幼虫后期敏感期的存在可能不仅受到神经发育或限制的限制，而且还受到影响幼虫经验对成年决定何时最可靠的生态因素的限制。