A recent study has found that butterflies maintain behavioural plasticity useful to them in rare environments by reducing associated costs in common environments. Butterflies use innate sensory biases to locate common green hosts, but learn to modify these preferences to find rare, red host-plants.

Learning allows animals to modify their behaviour in response to changes in their environment. If the environment remains relatively constant, however, it could be adaptive to rely on inflexible innate behavioural patterns to reduce (or eliminate) costs associated with learning [1]. Yet species living in relatively consistent environments can often adjust their phenotype successfully in alternative environments, suggesting that the costs of maintaining phenotypic plasticity could be low [2] and [3]. In a recent study Snell-Rood and Papaj [4] experimentally tested these theoretical predictions for the maintenance of phenotypic plasticity under consistent environmental conditions...

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