Trans-Saharan migratory patterns in and evidence for a southward leapfrog migration.

Some insects, such as the painted lady butterfly , exhibit complex annual migratory cycles spanning multiple generations. Traversing extensive seas or deserts is often a required segment of these migratory journeys. We develop a bioavailable strontium isoscape for Europe and Africa and then use isotope geolocation combining hydrogen and strontium isotopes to estimate the natal origins of painted ladies captured north and south of the Sahara during spring and autumn, respectively.

Systematic reduction of natural enemies and competition across variable precipitation approximates buffelgrass invasiveness () in its native range.

Invasive grasses cause devastating losses to biodiversity and ecosystem function directly and indirectly by altering ecosystem processes. Escape from natural enemies, plant-plant competition, and variable resource availability provide frameworks for understanding invasion. However, we lack a clear understanding of how natural stressors interact in their native range to regulate invasiveness.

Transposable Element Insertions Are Associated with Batesian Mimicry in the Pantropical Butterfly Hypolimnas misippus.

Hypolimnas misippus is a Batesian mimic of the toxic African Queen butterfly (Danaus chrysippus). Female H. misippus butterflies use two major wing patterning loci (M and A) to imitate three color morphs of D.

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.

Global biogeography of warning coloration in the butterfly .

Warning coloration provides a textbook example of natural selection, but the frequent observation of polymorphism in aposematic species presents an evolutionary puzzle. We investigated biogeography and polymorphism of warning patterns in the widespread butterfly using records from citizen science ( = 5467), museums ( = 8864) and fieldwork ( = 2586). We find that polymorphism in three traits controlled by known mendelian loci is extensive.