Butterflies are a diverse and charismatic insect group that are thought to have evolved with plants and dispersed throughout the world in response to key geological events. However, these hypotheses have not been extensively tested because a comprehensive phylogenetic framework and datasets for butterfly larval hosts and global distributions are lacking. We sequenced 391 genes from nearly 2,300 butterfly species, sampled from 90 countries and 28 specimen collections, to reconstruct a new phylogenomic tree of butterflies representing 92% of all genera. Our phylogeny has strong support for nearly all nodes and demonstrates that at least 36 butterfly tribes require reclassification. Divergence time analyses imply an origin ~100 million years ago for butterflies and indicate that all but one family were present before the K/Pg extinction event. We aggregated larval host datasets and global distribution records and found that butterflies are likely to have first fed on Fabaceae and originated in what is now the Americas. Soon after the Cretaceous Thermal Maximum, butterflies crossed Beringia and diversified in the Palaeotropics. Our results also reveal that most butterfly species are specialists that feed on only one larval host plant family. However, generalist butterflies that consume two or more plant families usually feed on closely related plants.
1. Long distance dispersal (LDD), or movements far beyond the occupied habitat borders, maintains the integrity of metapopulations in fragmented landscapes. Recent studies on butterflies increasingly reveal that LDD exists even in species that were long regarded as sedentary. Mark-recapture (MR) studies covering larger study areas typically reveal movements among distant colonies.2. We studied dispersal of the EU-protected, regionally endangered Euphydryas aurinia Rottemburg butterfly in the Czech Republic, using two complementary MR approaches. The single system study was carried out for eight seasons within 30 habitat patches covering 28 ha. The multiple populations study was carried out for a single season, but covering almost all Czech colonies of the species (82 colonies, 110 distinct patches, total area 324 ha within ca 1500 km 2 ). 3. Single system mean lifetime movements were consistently higher for males, but slopes of dispersal kernel power functions were shallower for females, implying that higher proportions of females crossed distances of several kilometres.4. The multiple populations study allowed detection of 51 lifetime movements exceeding 5 km (41 males, 10 females) and 14 movements exceeding 10 km (13 males, 1 female). Both mean lifetime movements and slopes of the dispersal kernels varied among systems, with no consistent pattern between sexes. All Czech Republic populations are within 0.1% movement probability of both sexes, whereas 1% movement probability delimits three separate management units. 5. Dispersal predictions from local data underestimate total mobility, warning against the use of local MR data for extrapolating long-distance movements. Local dispersal data, however, remain useful for analysing finer details of insect mobility.
Sex ratio biases in animal populations influence the genetically effective population size, and thus are of interest in conservation. A butterfly group in which many authors report biases towards males is the genus Parnassius Latreille, 1804 (Papilionidae). Using a vulnerable woodland species, P. mnemosyne, we carried out a detailed marking campaign designed to eliminate biases towards individual sexes on marking. We then estimated the numbers of males and females using constrained linear models (CLMs) (Cormack-Jolly-Seber and Jolly-Seber in MARK); compared details of mobility between males and females using the Virtual Migration (VM) model; and built CLMs containing weather variables in order to directly assess weather effects on survival. The estimated population size was 4000 adults, with a male : female sex ratio of 1.5-1.6. Both daily and average catchability were higher for males, while the residence values (i.e., survival) were higher for females. Migration parameters were similar for the sexes, with slightly lower male survival within patches and slightly higher male emigration. CLMs with weather substituted for or added to marking days performed worse than models with mere marking days, and although weather affected the sexes differently, males still retained lower survival. The surplus of adult males in the studied population of P. mnemosyne was real, not caused by increased male survival or a difference in mobility. Therefore, the bias toward males must appear prior to adult emergence, probably during the larval period.
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