Co-evolution of wing colour pattern and vision in Morpho butterflies

Collaborators: Violaine Llaurens & Vincent Debat (PIs, Muséum National d'Histoire Naturelle & CNRS, France)

Butterflies are colourful and recognition of specific wing colour pattern is likely use as a (1) species recognition and (2) mating cue. The evolution of wing colour pattern likely trigger the evolution of colour vision. In this project we are trying to investigate how duplication events in the eye photopigments (opsins) could tune the ability for butterflies to discriminate location and sex of closely related mimic species.

Phylogeny of Morpho butterflies genus (from Chazot et al., 2016) splitted in 2 group: a clade of canopy species (blue line) and a group of understory species (green line). Dimorphism between male (internal pictures) and females (external picture) is variable but often implies differences in blue coloration.

Chazot, N., Panara, S., Zilbermann, N., Blandin, P., Le Poul, Y., Cornette, R., et al. (2016) Morpho morphometrics: Shared ancestry and selection drive the evolution of wing size and shape in Morpho butterflies: MORPHO MORPHOMETRICS. Evolution, 70, 181–194.