Weighting of sensory cues reflect changing patterns of visual investment during ecological divergence in butterflies.

Integrating information across sensory modalities enables animals to orchestrate a wide range of complex behaviours. The relative importance placed on one sensory modality over another reflects the reliability of cues in a particular environment and corresponding differences in neural investment. As populations diverge across environmental gradients, the reliability of sensory cues may shift, favouring divergence in neural investment and the weight given to different sensory modalities.

Adaptive introgression of a visual preference gene.

Visual preferences are important drivers of mate choice and sexual selection, but little is known of how they evolve at the genetic level. In this study, we took advantage of the diversity of bright warning patterns displayed by butterflies, which are also used during mate choice. Combining behavioral, population genomic, and expression analyses, we show that two species have evolved the same preferences for red patterns by exchanging genetic material through hybridization.