How cyanide-eating butterflies led to Charles Perkins Centre appointment

"Nutritional ecology is so central to every aspect of life that it should be considered a foundational part of biology in the same way evolution is."Professor David Raubenheimer, the first chair appointed to the Charles Perkins Centre, bases his claim for nutritional ecology on his lifetime's study of a vast variety of species to understand the causes and consequences of their food selection.His path was set when, as a master's student, he studied butterflies which exclusively fed on cyanide-producing plants. There was extensive literature written on plant toxicology but very little on the nutrients the plants provided to the animals feeding on them. The term nutritional ecology was coined in the 1980s when the...