Early work by this and other groups have suggested that plant-feeding insects (including butterflies) are typically conservative specialists – they tend to stick to their diet of choice (e.g. Janz & Nylin 1998). However, when analyzing host plant utilization in the tribe Nymphalini in more detail, we found a bewildering number of host plant changes (see Janz et al. 2001) that were hard to reconcile with the "conservative specialist" axiom.
