Social Butterflies: Simple cues & rules, complex behavior and life-history consequences

Date
Nov 15, 2018, 12:30 pm12:30 pm
Location
Guyot 10
Audience
Open to public

Speaker

Details

Event Description

In 10 summers of field studies, I documented male mate-searching behaviors in 5 species of butterflies that span a range familiar among vertebrates: … vagrant encounter, site-fidelity, running a trapline, defending a territory, and “hanging out” at a literal singles’ bar.  The different behaviors produce varied patterns of disappearance from the local population.  In recent years, I have explored vision, flight, and details of behavior to propose simple cues and rules of interaction sufficient to produce the complex behaviors.  So this study spans scales of biological organization from sensory physiology, through behavior, to population ecology.  And it provides examples of how outright observational natural history interacts with conceptual biology.

Sponsor
Ecology and Evolutionary Biology
Event Category