Quantifying the manner in which ecological communities respond during a time of decreasing precipitation is a first step in understanding how they will respond to longer-term climate change. Here we coupled analysis of interannual variability in remotely sensed data with analyses of bird and butterfly community changes in montane meadow communities of the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem. Landsat ...

abstract a mountain glacier, when it occupies a river valley, immediately begins to change the cross-section and profile of that valley. river valleys in mountain areas tends to have v-shaped profiles. glaciers work to widen as well as deepen their valleys and the typical cross-section of a glacial valley is u-shaped. the u-shaped glacial valley is one of the most characteristic of glacial land...

the goal of this article is to study the shimashki potteries in the saymarreh valley. archaeological surveys conducted in the saymarreh valley shows that the painted pottery tradition of godin iii has become prevalent in the valley during the bronze age and only once, development of this pottery tradition had cracked. this event took place in the phase of godin iii4, which we relate it to the i...

Here we examine the ability of butterflies to learn colour cues in two different behavioural contexts, nectar foraging and oviposition, more or less simultaneously. We first trained female Battus philenor (Papilionidae) butterflies to associate a given colour with the presence of host plant leaf extract and assayed their colour preference; we then trained a subset of these butterflies to associ...

A newly developed flight simulator allows monarch butterflies to fly actively for up to several hours in any horizontal direction while their fall migratory flight direction can be continuously recorded. From these data, long segments of virtual flight paths of tethered, flying, migratory monarch butterflies were reconstructed, and by advancing or retarding the butterflies' circadian clocks, we...

in this paper, an advanced formulation of the spectral finite element method (sfem) is presented and applied in order to carry out site response analysis of 2d topographic structures subjected to vertically propagating incident in-plane waves in time-domain. the accuracy, efficiency and applicability of the formulation are demonstrated by solving some wave scattering examples. a numerical param...

To elucidate the purpose of butterfly puddling, we measured the amounts of Na+, K+, Ca2+, and Mg2+ that were absorbed or excreted during puddling by male Japanese Papilio butterflies through a urine test. All of the butterflies that sipped water with a Na+ concentration of 13 mM absorbed Na+ and excreted K+, although certain butterflies that sipped solutions with high concentrations of Na+ excr...

Butterflies of the neotropical Genus Heliconius feed on pollen. This is the first known instance in butterflies of a habit that is well known for other insects. The butterflies remove amino acids and proteins from pollen; this feeding innovation plays a role in the reproductive and population biology of these insects. It is suggested that other animals may use pollen in a similar fashion.