Developmental- and food-dependent foraging transcript levels in the desert locust

Drastic changes in the environment during a lifetime require developmental and physiological flexibility to ensure animal survival. Desert locusts, Schistocerca gregaria, live in an extremely changeable environment, which alternates between periods of rainfall and abundant food and periods of drought and starvation. In order to survive, locusts display an extreme form of phenotypic plasticity that allows them to rapidly cope with these changing conditions by converting from a cryptic solitarious phase to a swarming, voracious gregarious phase. To accomplish this, locusts possess different conserved mediators of phenotypic plasticity. Recently, attention has been drawn to the possible roles of protein kinases in this process. In addition to cyclic AMP-dependent protein kinase (PKA), also cyclic GMP-dependent protein kinase (PKG), which was shown to be involved in changes of food-related behavior in a variety of insects, has been associated with locust phenotypic plasticity. In this article, we study the transcript levels of the S. gregaria orthologue of the foraging gene that encodes a PKG in different food-related, developmental and crowding conditions. Transcript levels of the S. gregaria foraging orthologue are highest in different parts of the gut and differ between isolated and crowd-reared locusts. They change when the availability of food is altered, display a distinct pattern with higher levels after a moult and decrease with age during postembryonic development.