Editorial overview: Behavioural ecology-molecular and neural mechanisms underpinning adaptive behaviour in insects.

Around the turn of the century, there was a perception in some circles that behavioural ecology was dead [1]. However, the fashions in behavioural ecology that were then seen in decline were in fact dead before they were born (as indeed any science that thrives on fashion rather than discovery). Fields such as ‘fluctuating asymmetry’ and ‘UV vision’ have sunk into oblivion for all the right reasons: they harboured a good number of workers who would never let a rigorous experiment get in the way of a cute story. It is also good to see that most entomologists never fell for these fads — UV sensitivity, for example, had been discovered in the Hymenoptera a good century before it became a fashion in behavioural ecology [2], and by the time it did, its systematic distribution and its behavioural and evolutionary significance had already been thoroughly explored in insects [3], without any hyperbole at any stage. One reason why insect scientists are so successful in the analysis of behavioural adaptation is that they never fully disentangled the analysis of mechanisms from ethology. Why would such disentanglement be a problem, given that some textbooks still inform us that we can neatly segregate proximate from ultimate perspectives on animal behaviour?