[en] The Australian lycaenid butterfly Jalmenus evagoras has iridescent wings that are sexually dimorphic, spectrally and in their degree of polarization, suggesting that these properties are likely to be important in mate recognition. We first describe the results of a field experiment showing that free-flying individuals of J. evagoras discriminate between visual stimuli that vary in polarization content in blue wavelengths but not in others. We then present detailed reflectance spectrophotometry measurements of the polarization content of male and female wings, showing that female wings exhibit blue-shifted reflectance, with a lower degree of polarization relative to male wings. Finally, we describe a novel method for measuring alignment of ommatidial arrays: by measuring variation of depolarized eyeshine intensity from patches of ommatidia as a function of eye rotation, we show that (a) individual rhabdoms contain mutually perpendicular microvilli; (b) many rhabdoms in the array have their microvilli misaligned with respect to neighboring rhabdoms by as much as 45 deg; and (c) the misaligned ommatidia are useful for robust polarization detection. By mapping the distribution of the ommatidial misalignments in eye patches of J. evagoras, we show that males and females exhibit differences in the extent to which ommatidia are aligned. Both the number of misaligned ommatidia suitable for robust polarization detection and the number of aligned ommatidia suitable for edge detection vary with respect to both sex and eye patch elevation. Thus, J. evagoras exhibits finely tuned ommatidial arrays suitable for perception of polarized signals, likely to match sex-specific life history differences in the utility of polarized signals.
Disciplines :
Environmental sciences & ecology
Author, co-author :
Childers, Richard A Rabideau ; Department of Organismic & Evolutionary Biology, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA 02138, USA ; Museum of Comparative Zoology, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA 02138, USA
Bernard, Gary D ; Department of Electrical & Computer Engineering, University of Washington, Seattle, WA 98195, USA
Huang, Heqing ; Department of Applied Physics & Applied Mathematics, Columbia University, New York, NY 10027, USA
Tsai, Cheng-Chia ; Department of Applied Physics & Applied Mathematics, Columbia University, New York, NY 10027, USA
Stoddard, Mary Caswell ; Department of Ecology & Evolutionary Biology, Princeton University, Princeton, NJ 08544, USA
Hogan, Benedict G ; Department of Ecology & Evolutionary Biology, Princeton University, Princeton, NJ 08544, USA
Greenwood, Joel S F ; Center for Brain Science, Harvard University, 52 Oxford St - room 331, Cambridge, MA 02138, USA ; Neurotechnology Core, Kavli Institute for Neuroscience, Yale University School of Medicine, New Haven, CT 06510, USA
Soucy, Edward R ; Center for Brain Science, Harvard University, 52 Oxford St - room 331, Cambridge, MA 02138, USA
Cornwall, Mark ; Department of Organismic & Evolutionary Biology, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA 02138, USA ; Museum of Comparative Zoology, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA 02138, USA
Lim, Matthew Lek Min ; Department of Organismic & Evolutionary Biology, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA 02138, USA ; Museum of Comparative Zoology, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA 02138, USA ; Department of Biological Sciences, National University of Singapore, 16 Science Drive 4, Singapore117558
Lienard, Marjorie ; Université de Liège - ULiège > GIGA > GIGA Molecular Biology of Diseases ; Department of Organismic & Evolutionary Biology, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA 02138, USA ; The Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, Cambridge, MA 02142, USA ; Department of Biology, Lund University, 22362 Lund, Sweden
Yu, Nanfang ; Department of Applied Physics & Applied Mathematics, Columbia University, New York, NY 10027, USA
Pierce, Naomi E ; Department of Organismic & Evolutionary Biology, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA 02138, USA ; Museum of Comparative Zoology, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA 02138, USA
NSF - National Science Foundation [US-VA] AFOSR - Air Force Office of Scientific Research [US-VA] Sverige Vetenskapsrådet [SE]
Funding text :
R.A.R.C. was supported by the Graduate Research Fellowship Program (GRFP) of the National Science Foundation (NSF). Research was supported by the National Science Foundation (PHY-1411445 awarded to N.Y. and N.E.P., CMMI-2005747 awarded to N.Y., DEB-1541560 awarded to N.E.P.), the Air Force Office of Scientific Research (FA9550-16-1-0322 through the Defense University Research Instrumentation Program awarded to N.Y.), and the Swedish Research Council (Vetenskapsrådet, VR 2020-0517) to M.A.L. Deposited in PMC for immediate release.We thank James Crall, Mark A. Elgar, Gabriel Miller, Gerard Talavera and Roger Kitching for their advice on different parts of the manuscript. Roger and Beverly Kitching hosted us at their home in Brisbane while we were preparing to conduct behavioral assays (not once, but twice after we were rained out the first time). Various computations in this paper were run on the FASRC Cannon cluster supported by the FAS Division of Science Research Computing Group at Harvard University. We thank the Wetmore-Colles Fund of the MCZ for supporting Open Access. R.A.R.C. was supported by the Graduate Research Fellowship Program (GRFP) of the National Science Foundation (NSF). Research was supported by the National Science Foundation (PHY-1411445 awarded to N.Y. and N.E.P., CMMI-2005747 awarded to N.Y., DEB-1541560 awarded to N.E.P.), the Air Force Office of Scientific Research (FA9550-16-1-0322 through the Defense University Research Instrumentation Program awarded to N.Y.), and the Swedish Research Council (Vetenskapsrådet, VR 2020-0517) to M.A.L. Deposited in PMC for immediate release.
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