Professor Steve Montgomery is investigating what we can learn from a butterfly about the evolution of brains and behaviour

Pollen-eating Heliconius butterflies have remarkable powers of learning and memory. Professor Steve Montgomery is investigating what this can tell us about the evolution of brains and behaviour.

Montgomery was an undergraduate and PhD student at Cambridge, and has since worked at University College London, the University of Bristol, and the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute in Panama. He returned to Cambridge this year to take up the Prince Philip Professorship of Ecology and Evolution.

“I was originally investigating brain evolution in primates,” he says, “and as an early-career researcher I was looking for a model species for my experiments, to try and understand how our brains evolve and how that impacts our behaviour.”

After learning about his colleague Professor Chris Jiggins’ work on butterfly wing patterns, Montgomery wondered whether Heliconius butterflies might be the answer. He found a research paper from the 1980s describing the ‘mushroom body’ of Heliconius as particularly large compared to three other species of butterflies. So-called because it looks like a tiny mushroom, this is the part of a butterfly’s brain where learning and memory occur.

With a promising model species identified, Montgomery set out to map the anatomy of the mushroom body to better understand Heliconius brain wiring and how it develops. At the other end of the scale he started looking at the insect’s behaviour, to see how the two might be connected.

“In butterfly terms Heliconius have massive brains, with around eight times more wiring in their mushroom bodies than their closest butterfly relatives,”

says Montgomery.

“I want to understand how this expansion came about, and how the mushroom body has become specialised to process visual and spatial information.”

Read the full article on https://www.cam.ac.uk/stories/steve-montgomery-butterfly-research