Visiting Researcher Spotlight: Manidip Mandal

​We are pleased to welcome and host Manidip, a PhD student from Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznán, Poland. Manidip’s project involves quantifying volatiles from different species of grasses and determining whether they play a role in oviposition preferences and recruitment of natural enemies of grass-feeding butterflies. Manidip collaborated with our team to learn the pipeline of collecting and analyzing volatiles from grasses. Our collaboration started in May 2022, when Priscila (our PhD student) helped develop a method to collect volatiles from oaks and grasses in Poznán. After finishing the collections, Manidip came to Ceske Budejovice to learn how to analyze volatiles using GC-MS (Gas-Chromatography coupled with Mass Spectrometry). The experiments will show how phytohormone treatments can induce plants to release herbivore-induced plant volatiles that can recruit natural enemies. 

​Manidip’s PhD project was inspired by his long-standing interest in butterfly biology and chemical ecology. His project aims to determine how the appearance and quality of plants affect oviposition preference in grass-feeding butterflies. The ‘appearance’ includes visual and chemical stimuli such as color, shape, smell, and taste. The ‘quality’ of plants for larval growth and survival will depend on their nutrient content, physical and chemical defenses, and how larvae are adapted to cope with these plant traits.
Grass-feeding butterflies can face challenges associated with grasses as a resource, such as:
1) grasses often have low nutrition
2) they are very diverse and abundant, so it is difficult to identify under natural conditions
In this context, it is crucial to understand what strategies/traits these butterflies evolved to exploit grasses as a resource. Although correlations between appearance and quality likely drive the evolution of host-plant selection, this has not yet been approached comprehensively. Manidip will be very happy to discuss his project, you can contact him: manidip.mandal@amu.edu.pl