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Resource grain scales mobility and adult morphology in butterflies

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Abstract

Relations between species mobility and life history traits and/or landscape and habitat features are of broad interest to ecologists and conservation biologists. Here we investigated the reliability of the relations between mobility and (1) resource grain and (2) morphological traits in butterflies. Results were used to assess the biological realism of morphological traits associated with flight as mobility proxies. We then investigated how biological, environmental and landscape variables affected these mobility proxies. We used a multi-species approach on two different sites. Morphological traits were measured on ca. 20 individuals per site, species and sex. Resource distribution was carefully monitored by investigating the spatial distribution and overlap of larval and adult feeding resources, together representing the resource grain. The spatial extent of individual station keeping movements was estimated from distances recorded between successive recaptures of individuals from mark-release-recapture experiments. Morphological traits seemed reliable proxies of mobility, as both variables were strongly correlated. Morphological variations were related to flight type and spatial dimension of nectar resource. The most striking point was the clear relation between the index of relative investment in mobility versus fecundity in females with the spatial dimension of adult feeding resource. Given the generally accepted relation between abdomen volume and female fecundity, this suggests that females might invest more in fecundity when nectar resources are widespread. Finally, we did not detected effects of landscape structure on mobility, which indicates that functional grain of resources is more likely to influence mobility and evolution of morphology in butterflies than landscape connectivity.

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Acknowledgments

We thank Julie Choutt and Amélie Augem for their valuable help with field work and Hans Van Dyck and two anonymous reviewers for helpful comments on the first version of this manuscript. C.T. was supported by a Ph.D. grant of the FRIA-fund. N.S. is Research Associate of the Fund for Scientific Research-FNRS. Site access and permission to study the species in the field were granted by the Ministère de la Région Wallonne. This is publication BRC145 of the Biodiversity Research Centre at UCL.

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  1. Camille Turlure

    Present address: Muséum National d’Histoire Naturelle (MNHN), Département Ecologie et Gestion de la Biodiversité, CNRS UMR MNHN 7179 MAOAC, Avenue du Petit Château, 1, 91800, Brunoy, France

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Biodiversity Research Centre, Université catholique de Louvain, Place Croix du Sud, 4, 1348, Louvain-la-Neuve, Belgium

    Camille Turlure & Nicolas Schtickzelle

  2. Muséum National d’Histoire Naturelle (MNHN), Département Ecologie et Gestion de la Biodiversité, CNRS UMR MNHN 7179 MAOAC, Avenue du Petit Château, 1, 91800, Brunoy, France

    Michel Baguette

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  1. Camille Turlure
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Correspondence to Camille Turlure.

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Turlure, C., Schtickzelle, N. & Baguette, M. Resource grain scales mobility and adult morphology in butterflies. Landscape Ecol 25, 95–108 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10980-009-9403-3

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