Abstract
Monitoring climate changes and habitat degradation in threatened species without negative impact to the populations can pose a considerable challenge. A rare chance to test the morphological response of wing shape and size to environmental factors on the mountain Apollo (Parnassius apollo) collected from 1938 to 1968 at a single location – Strečno mountain pass, N Slovakia presented itself in a historical collection. The canonical variate analysis showed a significant shift from a narrower to broader forewing, with more extremes in either extra broad or narrow forewings in the post- 1960 population. Analysis of existing data was conducted to determine the possible factors affecting this change. Generally, the comparative statistics of temperature and precipitation to morphology of individuals and their fluctuating asymmetry showed no, or weak, correlations. Two extreme weather events (ECEs), identified using the historical weather data, show no correlation of wing morphology to these events. Although no strong correlations can be drawn in case of the available weather data and morphology, the results of this study can be connected to strong anthropogenic effects of a large-scale road development project taking place in the vicinity of the collection site starting in November 1959 causing changes in the available habitat and therefore a shift in the wing morphology.
Highlights
Sudden or continual alterations to the environment caused by natural or anthropogenic processes have been of interest to the scientific community for some time (Stern et al 1992)
All organisms exhibit a certain degree of morphological plasticity (Ananthakrishnan and Whitman 2005; Hoffmann et al 2005; Sukhodolskaya and Saveliev 2014), which describes the capacity of a genotype to display a range of phenotypes in response to changes in the environment (Garland and Kelly 2006; Whitman and Agrawal 2009) allowing organisms to maintain high fitness in the face of environmental heterogeneity (Pigliucci et al 2006)
We offer an analysis of the mountain Apollo, Parnassius apollo (Linnaeus, 1758), a xeromontainous papilionid butterfly with diminishing distribution across Europe
Summary
Sudden or continual alterations to the environment caused by natural or anthropogenic processes have been of interest to the scientific community for some time (Stern et al 1992). All organisms exhibit a certain degree of morphological (phenotypic) plasticity (Ananthakrishnan and Whitman 2005; Hoffmann et al 2005; Sukhodolskaya and Saveliev 2014), which describes the capacity of a genotype to display a range of phenotypes in response to changes in the environment (Garland and Kelly 2006; Whitman and Agrawal 2009) allowing organisms to maintain high fitness in the face of environmental heterogeneity (Pigliucci et al 2006) The monitoring of these changes in morphology is heavily focused on the symmetries and asymmetries of individuals in attempts to describe the underlining factors of these changes (Ananthakrishnan and Whitman 2005; Zvaríková et al 2016)
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