Chemical communication plays a major role in the organisation of ant societies, and is mimicked to near perfection by certain large blue (Maculinea) butterflies that parasitise Myrmica ant colonies. The recent discovery of differentiated acoustical communication between different castes of ants, and the fact that this too is mimicked by the butterflies, adds a new component of coevolutionary co...

The principal plant biomes in Nebraska are briefly reviewed. The relationships of insects, particularly scarab beetles and butterflies, to these biomes are discussed, especially as it relates to their distributions. Human-induced alteration of habitat has significantly influenced the present distributions of both plants and insects relative to their historical distributions at the time of Euro-...

This paper addresses the features of Hough Transform (HT) butterflies suitable for image-based segment detection and measurement. The full segment parameters such as the position, slope, width, length, continuity, and uniformity are related to the features of the HT butterflies. Mathematical analysis and experimental data are presented in order to demonstrate and build the relationship between ...

Monarch butterflies (Danaus plexippus) depend on the presence of host plants (Asclepias spp.) within their breeding range for reproduction. In the southern Great Plains, Asclepias viridis is a perennial that flowers in May and June, and starts to senesce by August. It is locally abundant and readily used by monarchs as a host plant. We evaluated the effects of summer prescribed fire on A. virid...

Members of the diverse butterfly families Nymphalidae (brush-footed butterflies) and Riodinidae (metalmarks) have reduced first thoracic limbs and only use two pairs of legs for walking. In order to address questions about the detailed morphology and evolutionary origins of these reduced limbs, the three thoracic limbs of 13 species of butterflies representing all six butterfly families were ex...

Olfaction is in many species the most important sense, essential for food search, mate finding, and predator avoidance. Butterflies have been considered a microsmatic group of insects that mainly rely on vision due to their diurnal lifestyle. However, an emerging number of studies indicate that butterflies indeed use the sense of smell for locating food and oviposition sites. To unravel the neu...