Butterfly Individuals Research Articles

Synchrotron-source micro-x-ray computed tomography for examining butterfly eyes.

Comparative anatomy is an important tool for investigating evolutionary relationships among species, but the lack of scalable imaging tools and stains for rapidly mapping the microscale anatomies of related species poses a major impediment to using comparative anatomy approaches for identifying evolutionary adaptations. We describe a method using synchrotron source micro-x-ray computed tomography (syn-μXCT) combined with machine learning algorithms for high-throughput imaging of Lepidoptera (i.e., butterfly and moth) eyes. Our pipeline allows for imaging at rates of ~15 min/mm3 at 600 nm3 resolution. Image contrast is generated using standard electron microscopy labeling approaches (e.g., osmium tetroxide) that unbiasedly labels all cellular membranes in a species-independent manner thus removing any barrier to imaging any species of interest. To demonstrate the power of the method, we analyzed the 3D morphologies of butterfly crystalline cones, a part of the visual system associated with acuity and sensitivity and found significant variation within six butterfly individuals. Despite this variation, a classic measure of optimization, the ratio of interommatidial angle to resolving power of ommatidia, largely agrees with early work on eye geometry across species. We show that this method can successfully be used to determine compound eye organization and crystalline cone morphology. Our novel pipeline provides for fast, scalable visualization and analysis of eye anatomies that can be applied to any arthropod species, enabling new questions about evolutionary adaptations of compound eyes and beyond.

Community Composition and Dynamics of Butterflies in Different Microhabitats of Central Aravalli Hill Regions of Ajmer District, Rajasthan, India

Aims: Butterflies are the symbol and target species for conservation in many parts of the world, and are key indicators of an environment's ecological status. The abundance, brief generation time, quick movement, and sensitivity to climatic changes of the butterfly fauna make it a significant predictor. It is crucial for effective and suitable butterfly protection to conduct research on biodiversity, ecology, and habitat suitability.
 Place and Duration of Study: The study was conducted in Ajmer City, Rajasthan, India. The four sites for butterfly collection were Open Land, Scrub Land, Aravalli Hills, and MDS University Campus to reflect the variety of environments in Ajmer. Scrub land makes up 1.5 km2, open ground 1.3 km2, the MDS University campus 0.5 km2, and the Aravalli hills 2 km2 of the 5.3 km2 research regions.
 Methodology: For butterfly studies, the Pollard walk technique was used, with 20 fixed transects placed stratified and randomly across four environments. Adult butterfly individuals were noted while walking at a slow, steady speed within a assumptive 5 m radius and Alpha and Beta diversity analysis was performed using PAST 4.06 and Microsoft Excel 2010
 Results: During the study, 54 butterfly species from five groups were identified. The most diverse families were Nymphalidae and Pieridae, then Lycaenidae, Hesperiidae, Papilionidae.
 Conclusion: It is essential to track changes in the butterfly population as an indicator for climate and human impacts because they are sensitive to changes in their surroundings, they perform functions like pollinating various plant species. However, by planting appropriate trees, plants, and other vegetation that will support the organisms' continued health, we can at least try to lessen them. At a minimum, this attempt will prevent the common species from facing extinction.

Body size, not species identity, drives body heating in alpine Erebia butterflies

Efficient thermoregulation is crucial for animals living under fluctuating climatic and weather conditions. We studied the body heating of six butterfly species of the genus Erebia (Lepidoptera: Nymphalidae) that co-occur in the European Alps. We tested whether butterfly physical characteristics (body size, wing loading) are responsible for the inter-specific differences in body temperatures recorded previously under natural conditions. We used a thermal camera to measure body heating of wild butterfly individuals in a laboratory experiment with artificial light and heating sources. We revealed that physical characteristics had a small effect on explaining inter-specific differences in mean body temperatures recorded in the field. Our results show that larger butterflies, with higher weight and wing loading, heated up more slowly but reached the same asymptotic body temperature as smaller butterflies. Altogether, our results suggest that differences in body temperatures among Erebia species observed in the field might be caused mainly by species-specific microhabitat use and point towards an important role of active behavioural thermoregulation in adult butterflies. We speculate that microclimate heterogeneity in mountain habitats facilitates behavioural thermoregulation of adults. Similarly, microclimate structuring might also increase survival of less mobile butterfly life stages, i.e., eggs, larvae and pupae. Thus, landscape heterogeneity in management practices may facilitate long term survival of montane invertebrates under increased anthropogenic pressures.

AN INVENTORY OF DIVERSITY OF BUTTERFLY SPECIES IN LUCKNOW REGION OF NORTHERN INDIAN PLAIN

Butterflies are more elegant and appealing than most insects, they are included in the order Lepidoptera. They are varied in shape, size and colour. They are found everywhere throughout the world apart from the poles. The present study aims to provide a baseline for the analysis of population status of butterfly species and their dispersion in Lucknow region. The butterfly individuals were collected randomly for twelve consecutive months, August 2021 to July 2022. The butterfly data was collected by using the photographic evidences, capture and release method as well as by visual observations. The butterfly diversity was determined to quantify the values of Shannon diversity index (H) and Simpson diversity index (D). Notably, 40 species of butterfly of 5 families and number of individuals of each species were monthly recorded during the entire period. Overall, this site showed higher diversity of butterfly species. In this region, the Shannon-Weiner diversity index (H) and Simpson diversity index (D) were measured 3.652 and 0.974, respectively. The identified butterflies in the campus are from families Nymphalidae (20 species), Pieridae (8 species), Hesperiidae (5 species), Lycanidae (4 species) and Paplionidae (3 species). The findings showed a marked diversified pattern of butterfly species. This may be attributed to the more diverse habitats in Lucknow region.

Diversity, Dominance and Evenness of Butterflies in Southern Part of Western Ghats (Palani Hills)

The present study has been done in the southern part of Western Ghats of Palani Hills in Tamilnadu. It was conferred as a global biodiversity hotspot that includes Kodaikanal Wildlife Sanctuary is to be proposed. We have studied the Diversity, Dominance and Evenness of butterflies in different habitats (forest area, crop area and river bank) during the period of December 2018 to March 2019. A total number of 92 species, from 65 genera and 5 families were recorded. The diversity of species and abundance have recorded maximum in March-May and dropped it to the minimum in December 2018-January 2019. Forest area habitats had greater species diversity, while the river bank habitat had a greater number of butterflies; crop area had the least diversity of individuals and abundance present in the studied habitats. We have also recorded the endemism and the flight period of some of the butterflies and their distribution range within the habitats with their nectar source plants. Analyses were also done to emphasize the importance of butterfly individuals and their need for conservation.

Marked Differences in Butterfly Assemblage Composition between Forest Types in Central Amazonia, Brazil

Amazonia comprises a mosaic of contrasting habitats, with wide environmental heterogeneity at local and regional scales. In central Amazonia, upland forest (terra firme) is the predominant forest type and seasonally flooded forests inundated by white- and black-water rivers (várzea and igapó, respectively) represent around 20% of the forested areas. In this work, we took advantage of a natural spatial arrangement of the main vegetation types in central Amazonia to investigate butterfly assemblage structure in terra firme, várzea and igapó forests at the local scale. We sampled in the low- and high-water seasons, combining active and passive sampling with traps placed in both the understory and canopy. Terra firme supported the highest number of butterfly species, whereas várzea forest provided the highest number of butterfly captures. The high species richness in terra firme may reflect that this forest type is floristically richer than várzea and igapó. Várzea is a very productive environment and may thus support a higher number of butterfly individuals than terra firme and igapó. Most butterfly species (80.2%) were unique to a single forest type and 17 can be considered forest type indicator species in this landscape. Floodplain forest environments are therefore an important complement to terra firme in terms of butterfly species richness and conservation in Amazonia.

Improving monarch butterfly optimization through simulated annealing strategy

AbstractCurrently, a novel of meta-heuristic algorithm called monarch butterfly optimization (MBO) is presented for solving machine learning and continuous optimization problems. It has been proved experimentally that MBO is superior to artificial bee colony algorithm (ABC), ant colony optimization algorithm (ACO), Biogeography-based optimization (BBO), differential evolution algorithm (DE) and simple genetic algorithm (SGA) algorithms on most test functions. This paper presents a new version of MBO with simulated annealing (SA) strategy called SAMBO. The SA strategy is put in the migration operator and butterfly adjusting operator. So the newly proposed algorithm has two features: One is that the algorithm accepts all the butterfly individuals whose fitness are better than their parents. The other is that the algorithm randomly selects some individuals which are worse than their parents to disturbance the convergence of algorithm. In this way, the SAMBO algorithm can escape from local optima. Finally, the experiments are carried on 14 continuous nonlinear functions, and results show that SAMBO method exceeds the MBO algorithm on most test functions.

Status of lycaenid butterflies in some selected forests of Bangladesh

A field investigation was carried out from January 2015 to December 2017 to study the status of some lycaenid butterflies in some selected forest areas of Bangladesh. A total of 6,724 lycaenids was recorded from Butterfly Research Park at Bhawal National Park, Gazipur; Madhupur National Park, Tangail; Satchori National Park and Rema-Kalenga Wildlife Sanctuary of Habigonj. The dominant species was Arhopala pseudocentaurus with 21.85% relative frequency and the least abundant species was Rathinda amor with 0.75% relative frequency. Butterfly Research Park showed the maximum number of butterfly individuals with a covariance of 40% followed by Madhupur National Park (37%), Rema-Kalenga Wildlife Sanctuary (13%), and Satchori National Park (10%). A significant difference (F = 3.52, p-value = 0.02) has been assessed using „One-way ANOVA‟ test. The difference in the availability of butterflies in different habitats indicated the differences in plant diversity among the forests. Lycaenid butterflies displayed highest abundance (13.19%) in December and lowest (5.38%) in October. There was no significant difference (F = 0.72, p-value = 0.71) among different months throughout the study period in overall species abundance though highest number was recorded in December. The abiotic factors (viz. temperature and relative humidity etc.) influence the presence of butterflies. Lycaenid butterflies demonstrated the highest abundance (887) in 26.9°C along with 64% relative humidity whereas the least abundance (362) has been recorded at 31.7°C with 77% relative humidity. The significant negative correlation was found in between lycaenid abundance and temperature (r = ─ 0.45, pvalue = 0.14), and between lycaenid abundance and relative humidity (r = ─ 0.19, p-value = 0.54). The butterfly population increased with decreasing average temperature and relative humidity during the study period. This investigation reveals the differences in the availability of lycaenid butterflies in relation to the differences in plant population and also the effect of abiotic factors in the forest areas.
 J. Biodivers. Conserv. Bioresour. Manag. 2019, 5(2): 19-32

A Monarch Butterfly Optimization for the Dynamic Vehicle Routing Problem

The dynamic vehicle routing problem (DVRP) is a variant of the Vehicle Routing Problem (VRP) in which customers appear dynamically. The objective is to determine a set of routes that minimizes the total travel distance. In this paper, we propose a monarch butterfly optimization (MBO) algorithm to solve DVRPs, utilizing a greedy strategy. Both migration operation and the butterfly adjusting operator only accept the offspring of butterfly individuals that have better fitness than their parents. To improve performance, a later perturbation procedure is implemented, to maintain a balance between global diversification and local intensification. The computational results indicate that the proposed technique outperforms the existing approaches in the literature for average performance by at least 9.38%. In addition, 12 new best solutions were found. This shows that this proposed technique consistently produces high-quality solutions and outperforms other published heuristics for the DVRP.

Pluralism in grassland management promotes butterfly diversity in a large Central European conservation area

Extensively harvested grassland ecosystems contribute substantially to European biodiversity, but different kinds of grassland usage may selectively foster individual taxa. A combination of management options may offer a promising way to maximize biodiversity at the landscape scale. Here, we test this hypothesis based on 91 butterfly samples taken in the years 2013–2015 in differently managed areas within a large conservation area, the National Park Neusiedler See/Seewinkel in eastern-most Austria. Altogether, we recorded 4713 butterfly individuals of 35 species. Based on these records, we show that the parallelism of three management options, i.e. pasturing by mobile cattle herds, annual hay cut in early summer, and fallow land mulched in late summer, increase species diversity of butterflies and burnet moths in the regional meta-community. Even though spatial distances between our sample sites were small compared to the activity ranges of adult butterflies, we found that species composition of butterfly and burnet assemblages significantly differed between the three management options, indicating that assemblages were shaped by factors at the site level. Differences in species composition were stable across three consecutive years, even though there was annual variation in butterfly assemblages. Other tested co-variables (soil moisture, soil nitrogen, abundance of nectar flowers and local plant species richness) did not additionally contribute to explaining species composition of butterfly communities. We conclude that maintaining a combination of three complementary management options is indeed a relevant strategy for biodiversity preservation in this internationally renowned conservation area.

A new monarch butterfly optimization with an improved crossover operator

Recently, by examining and simulating the migration behavior of monarch butterflies in nature, Wang et al. proposed a new swarm intelligence-based metaheuristic algorithm, called monarch butterfly optimization (MBO), for addressing various global optimization tasks. The effectiveness of MBO was verified by benchmark evaluation on an array of unimodal and multimodal test functions in comparison with the five state-of-the-art metaheuristic algorithms on most benchmarks. However, MBO failed to come up with satisfactory performance (Std values and mean fitness) on some benchmarks. In order to overcome this, a new version of MBO algorithm, incorporating crossover operator is presented in this paper. A variant of the original MBO, the proposed one is essentially a self-adaptive crossover (SAC) operator. A kind of greedy strategy is also utilized. It ensures that only the better monarch butterfly individuals, satisfying a certain criterion, are allowed to pass to the next generation, instead of all the updated monarch butterfly individuals, as was done in the basic MBO. In other words, the proposed methodology is essentially a new version of the original MBO, supplemented with Greedy strategy and self-adaptive Crossover operator (GCMBO). In GCMBO, the SAC operator can significantly improve the diversity of population during the later run phase of the search. In butterfly adjusting operator, the greedy strategy is used to select only those monarch butterfly individuals, possessing improved fitness and hence can aid towards accelerating convergence. Finally, the proposed GCMBO method is benchmarked by twenty-five standard unimodal and multimodal test functions. The results clearly demonstrate the capability of GCMBO in significantly outperforming the basic MBO method for almost all the test cases. The MATLAB code used in the paper can be found in the website: http://www.mathworks.com/matlabcentral/fileexchange/55339-gcmbo .

Demography and mobility of three common understory butterfly species from tropical rain forest of Papua New Guinea

AbstractThe mobility of butterflies determines their ability to find host plant species, and thus their potential host plant range, as well as their ability to maintain meta‐populations in fragmented habitats. While butterfly movement has been extensively studied for temperate species, very little is known for tropical forest species. A mark‐release‐recapture study of the three most common butterfly species in the understory of a lowland primary rainforest in Papua New Guinea included 3,705, 394 and 317 marked individuals of Danis danis, Taenaris sp. and Parthenos aspila respectively, with 1,031, 78 and 40 butterfly individuals recaptured at least once. Over a period of 6 weeks there were almost 22,000 individuals belonging to these three species hatching within or entering our four study plots totaling 14.58 ha in area. The most abundant species, D. danis, with 20,000 individuals, showed highly variable population densities during the study. The residency time in the studied plots was highest for P. aspila (84 days), as individual butterflies stayed mostly in a single gap; we estimated that less than 1 % of individuals disperse 1 km or more. Similar movement probability was found in D. danis whilst in Taenaris sp., 10 % of the population disperses ≥1 km. Movement distances of D. danis were more than sufficient to locate its host plant, Derris elliptica, which occurred in 61 % of the 20 × 20 m subplots within a 50 ha plot. Compared with temperate species, our three species have much longer life spans, but their movement patterns remain within the known mobility estimates of temperate species. The mobility of D. danis is close to the average for temperate Lycaenidae, while Taenaris sp. is more mobile and P. aspila less mobile than the mean for all temperate species.

Effects of Management Techniques on Grassland Butterfly Species Composition and Community Structure

Semi-natural grasslands are a crucial habitat for many butterfly species and the structure and extent of that grassland often dictates the composition of butterfly communities on the landscape. To understand effects on butterfly communities, we studied the impacts of different management schemes used to maintain semi-natural grasslands, including mowing every 3 y, mowing annually, and continuous summertime grazing. Transect count data were gathered over the 3 summers (2007–2009) in the Southern Appalachian Mountains of western Virginia and North Carolina. Eleven thousand two hundred and four butterfly individuals of 42 different species were documented over the course of the study. Fields with minimal management, being mowed only once every 3 y, had the largest benefit to butterfly communities. Species richness, abundance, and Shannon diversity was significantly higher in these fields. While abundance was not significantly different between annually mowed fields and grazed fields, mowed fields were significantly higher in richness and diversity. The analysis of habitat specialist species revealed minimally managed and mowed fields were higher in abundance and richness than grazed fields. The response of individual butterfly species also showed negative effects of grazing on habitat specialists. Overall, the results suggest a varying response by different groups of species as well as individual species, indicating multiple management techniques are necessary for conserving a wide range of species. Specific techniques can be used in conservation to target specialist groups of butterflies and rare species.

The Effects of Field Mowing on Adult Butterfly Assemblages in Central New York State

We investigated the effects of mowing on butterfly counts in fields and woodland openings in upstate New York. We predicted that total counts of butterfly individuals would decrease immediately after mowing, but increase in the year following mowing at corresponding times in the growing season. To test these predictions, we used modified Pollard transects to obtain counts from three sampling ses- sions prior to and three sampling sessions after mowing. These counts were compared to those on similar dates in subsequent non-mowing years. The results show a significant decrease in counts of butterflies immediately following mowing, compared to the same periods in non-mowed years. The immediate decrease in counts following mowing may be due to the loss of nectaring sources, since nectaring and nectaring sources declined sharply following mowing, but recovered within a month following mow- ing. In the year following mowing, the rebound was significantly greater in fields (> 0.20 ha) than in woodland openings (< 0.19 ha). While species varied in their rebound, only two of 24 species (Pieris rapae and Danaus plexippus) declined significantly in the year following mowing.