Directed aerial displacement requires that a volant organism's airspeed exceeds ambient wind speed. For biologically relevant altitudes, wind speed increases exponentially with increased height above the ground. Thus, dispersal of most insects is influenced by atmospheric conditions. However, insects that fly close to the Earth's surface displace within the flight boundary layer where insect ai...

Determining the permeability of different types of landscape matrices to animal movement is essential for conserving populations in fragmented landscapes. We evaluated the effects of habitat patch size and matrix type on diversity, isolation, and dispersal of ithomiine butterflies in forest fragments surrounded by coffee agroecosystems in the Colombian Andes. Because ithomiines prefer a shaded ...

condition of contour lines in topographic maps, explains more geomorphologic issues such as effective processes in the land forms found in nature. change in the curvature of the transverse profile of a valley in mountainous areas, the peak of the mountain range, also reflect the geomorphologic features and expresses the tectonic events and climate changes occurring in the region. these changes ...

study area is located in the central kopehdagh north of bojnurd and shirvan cities, between kakli and raz villages. aim of this research is separating high activity area from low activity. in this study, in order to evaluate rate of tectonic activity, stream length-gradient index (sl), ratio of valley floor width to valley height (vf), transverse topographic system (t), hypsometric integral (hi...

The butterfly Bicyclus anynana exhibits phenotypic plasticity involving the wet-season phenotype, which possesses marginal eyespots on the ventral surface of the wings, and the dry-season form, which lacks these eyespots. We examined the adaptive value of phenotypic plasticity of B. anynana in relation to the defence mechanisms of crypsis and deflection. We assessed the visibility differences b...

The human eye is insensitive to the angular direction of the light e-vector, but several animal species have the ability to discriminate differently polarized lights. How the polarization is detected is often unclear, however. Egg-laying Papilio butterflies have been shown to see false colours when presented with differently polarized lights. Here we asked whether this also holds in foraging bu...

Butterflies are believed to use mainly visual cues when searching for food and oviposition sites despite that their olfactory system is morphologically similar to their nocturnal relatives, the moths. The olfactory ability in butterflies has, however, not been thoroughly investigated. Therefore, we performed the first study of odour representation in the primary olfactory centre, the antennal l...