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The colouration toolkit of the Pipevine Swallowtail butterfly, Battus philenor: thin films, papiliochromes, and melanin

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Abstract

The ventral hindwings of Pipevine Swallowtail butterflies, Battus philenor, display a colourful pattern, created by variously coloured wing scales. Reflectance and transmittance measurements of single scales indicate that the cream and orange scales contain papiliochrome pigments, while brown, black and blue scales contain melanin. Microspectrophotometry and scatterometry of both sides of the wing scales show that the lower lamina acts as a thin film, with reflection properties dependent on the scale’s pigmentation. Notably in the orange scales, the reflectance spectrum of the lower lamina is tuned to the pigment’s absorbance spectrum. The dorsal hindwings of the male (but not the female) B. philenor are blue-green iridescent. At oblique illumination, the light reflected by the male’s dorsal hindwings can be highly polarised, which may have a function in intersexual signalling.

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Acknowledgments

We thank Dumas Galvez for collaboration, and Drs Kentaro Arikawa, Helen Ghiradella, Nathan Morehouse and Ronald Rutowski as well as an anonymous referee for valuable comments at the manuscript. This study was financially supported by the Air Force Office of Scientific Research/European Office of Aerospace Research and Development AFOSR/EOARD (grant FA8655-08-1-3012).

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  1. Bodo D. Wilts

    Present address: Cavendish Laboratory, Department of Physics, University of Cambridge, JJ Thomson Avenue, Cambridge, CB3 0HE, UK

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Computational Physics, Zernike Institute for Advanced Materials, University of Groningen, 9747, AG Groningen, The Netherlands

    Doekele G. Stavenga, Hein L. Leertouwer & Bodo D. Wilts

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  1. Doekele G. Stavenga
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  2. Hein L. Leertouwer
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  3. Bodo D. Wilts
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Correspondence to Doekele G. Stavenga.

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Paper for a special issue of JCPA, celebrating the 100th anniversary of the publication of the paper by Karl von Frisch demonstrating honeybee colour vision.

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Stavenga, D.G., Leertouwer, H.L. & Wilts, B.D. The colouration toolkit of the Pipevine Swallowtail butterfly, Battus philenor: thin films, papiliochromes, and melanin. J Comp Physiol A 200, 547–561 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00359-014-0901-7

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