The genetic legacy of the Quaternary ice ages for West Palearctic butterflies.

The interplay between geographic barriers and climatic oscillations over the past 2.6 million years structured genetic variation at the continental scale. The genetic legacy of the Quaternary ice ages (GLQ) hypothesis outlines this phenomenon for Europe, but a comprehensive data-driven assessment is lacking.

Pollen metabarcoding reveals the origin and multigenerational migratory pathway of an intercontinental-scale butterfly outbreak.

Migratory insects may move in large numbers, even surpassing migratory vertebrates in biomass. Long-distance migratory insects complete annual cycles through multiple generations, with each generation's reproductive success linked to the resources available at different breeding grounds. Climatic anomalies in these grounds are presumed to trigger rapid population outbreaks.

The Afrotropical breeding grounds of the Palearctic-African migratory painted lady butterflies ().

Migratory insects are key players in ecosystem functioning and services, but their spatiotemporal distributions are typically poorly known. Ecological niche modeling (ENM) may be used to predict species seasonal distributions, but the resulting hypotheses should eventually be validated by field data. The painted lady butterfly () performs multigenerational migrations between Europe and Africa and has become a model species for insect movement ecology.

Migratory behaviour is positively associated with genetic diversity in butterflies.

Migration is typically associated with risk and uncertainty at the population level, but little is known about its cost-benefit trade-offs at the species level. Migratory insects in particular often exhibit strong demographic fluctuations due to local bottlenecks and outbreaks. Here, we use genomic data to investigate levels of heterozygosity and long-term population size dynamics in migratory insects, as an alternative to classical local and short-term approaches such as regional field monitoring.

The genome sequence of the painted lady, Linnaeus 1758.

We present a genome assembly from an individual female (the painted lady; Arthropoda; Insecta; Lepidoptera; Nymphalidae). The genome sequence is 425 megabases in span. The majority of the assembly is scaffolded into 32 chromosomal pseudomolecules, with the W and Z sex chromosome assembled.

Understanding resource driven female-female competition: ovary and liver size in sand gobies.

The operational sex ratio (OSR, ready-to-mate males to females) is a key factor determining mating competition. A shortage of a resource essential for reproduction of one sex can affect OSR and lead to competition within the opposite sex for resource-holding mates. In the sand goby (), a fish with paternal care, male readiness to mate depends on acquiring a nest-site, whereas food abundance primarily impacts female egg production.