Behavioral responses host selection

Some of the problems in understanding the behavioral processes that are involved in discriminating host from nonhost are illustrated by the design of bioassays to identify specific oviposition stimulants for swallowtail butterflies. At one time, it was generally believed that insects utilized specific secondary plant compounds as token or sign stimuli to identify their hosts (Verschaffelt 1911 Dethier 1941 Fraenkel 1959, reviewed by Feeny et al. 1983). A great deal of effort was expended to identify such token stimuli, and most of it was unsuccessful the behavior of host selection was rarely linked to a single plant chemical. Instead, host selection came to be appreciated as the end result of several behavioral responses to a number of physical, chemical, and visual cues (reviewed by Miller Strickler 1984). 

Our specific conclusions are 1) Individual compounds can affect interactions across multiple levels of scale, from molecular through landscape 2) At each level of scale, the same compounds can be sources of both positive and negative feedback. Their interactions across scales can be amplified or buffered, depending on these feedback processes 3) Host selection behavior can be an important link between physiological and population processes, particularly where responses to phytochemicals are plastic 4) Tritrophic interactions mediated by chemical cues can be either important or ineffective constraints on eruptive behavior, depending on how prey are spatially and temporally distributed, which in turn reflects their host... 

Negative efficacy, by definition, efficacy is that property of a molecule that causes the receptor to change its behavior toward the biological host. Negative efficacy refers to the property of selective affinity of the molecule for the inactive state of the receptor this results in inverse agonism. Negative efficacy causes the active antagonism of constitutive receptor activity but is only observed in systems that have a measurably elevated basal response due to constitutive activity. It is a property of the molecule and not the system. 

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