"A leopard can't change its spots." This idiom suggests that a creature cannot significantly change its innate characteristics, or the features with which it was born. Is this actually true, especially in the context of innate characteristics of the brain? Innate characteristics are those that an organism is born with, things that come naturally to it. Instead of chasing leopards to find the answer, a feat ill-suited to my unathletic legs, I turned to hoverflies to probe this fundamental question: how flexible is innate behavior?
I chose hoverflies as the model organism for my research because they are solitary, generalist pollinators. They are "solitary" in the sense that they do not live with other hoverflies in hives, like bees do, and they do not receive parental care or guidance regarding important matters such as how to find flowers, their only food source. Thus, they have to be born with an innate understanding of what a flower is or else they would starve. For the hoverfly, these innate behaviors are a matter of life or death.
So why study hoverflies, and not butterflies or dragonflies, both of which are also solitary insects? Hoverflies are of special interest to our lab group because they are generalists, which means that they feed from any type of flower instead of one particular species of flower.
