Congratulations to the winners of the 2025 Royal Entomological Society Journal Awards.
Physiological Entomology is a distinguished Royal Entomological Society journal with a unique focus on insects and arthropods, investigating their functioning and adaptations using experimental methods.
Papers from this journal address any area of insect physiology and provide valuable insights into how insects cope with their biotic and abiotic environments. Emphasizing physiological and experimental approaches, we publish research that fosters a deeper understanding of basic insect biology, the link between genotype and phenotype, and how insects adapt to environmental change.
Physiological Entomology Winner
Alycia Lackey: Species differences in reproductive timing and egg load in two fly species adapted to different host plants 50.3
Alicia Lackey is an evolutionary and behavioural ecologist who studies how rapid adaptation plays a role in response to changing environments and the evolution of new species. Her research approaches combine fieldwork, experimental studies, and genomics. She works on wild populations of flies (Rhagoletis) and salamanders (Ambystoma), which are both sensitive to environmental change and adapted to their local environments.
By examining how these organisms interact with their environments and evolve over time, her work aims to reveal how ecological pressures shape behaviour, life history, and genetic variation.
Hawthorn fly female (Rhagoletis pomonella)
Photo credit: Sophia Anner
This work demonstrates how even closely related species can evolve different reproductive strategies depending on their environment. Studying two fruit-infesting fly species adapted to different host plants, Alicia Lackey and her co-authors found that the timing of egg development and number of eggs females produced varied between species, reflecting local ecological conditions.
Overall, reproduction is shaped by a mix of shared biological limits and species-specific adaptations to their environment, rather than predicted simply by body size alone.
“Insects use a variety of life history strategies to maximize fitness in specific environments. In this paper, Lackey et al. test the extent to which two species of fruit flies adapted to different hosts use distinct reproductive strategies.
The authors nicely show that despite being phylogenetically related, these two species differ with regards to the timing of reproduction and the extent to which body size predicts fecundity. This paper has important implications for linking physiology and evolutionary biology, and the use of wild-caught insects adds to the ecological relevance of the findings. It also has a solid theoretical framework and is well-written with clearly presented figures.”
– Judges’ comments
Undergraduate research team. Undergraduates at the University of Louisville, Sihan Sun, Kaitlin Damron, Alex Scheper, Alyssa Wilson, and Alyssa Gebhardt, provided exceptional help with data collection and insect husbandry.
