fly up to 3,000 miles from southern Canada and the upper reaches of the United States to their wintering grounds in mountain forests outside Mexico City., an animal ecologist at the University of Georgia. “But one of the things that we still don’t understand very well is how they’re capable of making such a tremendous flight while being such a small animal with limited energy.”
Amazingly, some of the monarch’s continent-spanning magic may be owed to the size of its itty bitty wing spots,By studying photos of wing patterns of nearly 400 monarchs collected at various locations on their migration path, Davis and his co-authors discovered an interesting pattern—butterflies that make the journey all the way to Mexico tend to have white wing spots that are three percent larger than those of monarchs found in places such as Georgia or Minnesota.
“If you want to develop drones that are flying for longer time and harnessing energy from sunlight, this is the best thing that we can look at,” says study co-authorHow the monarch butterfly got its spots The second part of the study evaluated size differences in white spots between the monarch and six of its closest cousins in the genusWhen study co-author Christina Vu, then a student of Davis’, quantified the size of all those butterflies’ spots, she found the monarchs had by far the largest white markings.
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How the monarch got its spots: Long-distance migration selects for larger white spots on monarch butterfly wingsElucidating the adaptations that promote flight in animals can aid the understanding of evolution and species divergence, and/or provide inspiration for aerospace engineering and the design of better aerial vehicles. The famed long-distance migration of monarch butterflies in North America still holds many questions and opportunities for inspiration. For example, there is little research on whether the monarch’s primary wing colors themselves (black, orange, or white) have any aerodynamic or migration function. Dark colors on wings of other animals have recently been shown to aid flight by enhancing solar absorption, which reduces drag forces. However, too much black surface could be problematic for monarchs, which are exposed to increasing amounts of solar energy along their flightpath. This paper describes the results of two related investigations that attempt to elucidate the importance of wing color to the monarch migration. By measuring the color proportions of nearly 400 monarch wings collected at different stages of their journey, we found, surprisingly, that successful migrants tended to have less black on their wings (about 3% less), but also more white pigment (about 3% more); monarchs have a band of light-colored marginal wing spots. Second, image analysis of museum specimens revealed migratory monarchs had significantly larger white spots, proportional to the wing area, than most non-migratory, New World Danaid butterflies, which argues spot size has evolved along with migratory behavior. Combined, these findings strongly suggest that the long-distance migration itself selects for larger white spots every fall, so that only those individuals with large spots will survive to pass on their genes. Further experimental work is needed to elucidate how the spots aid the migration, but it is possible that they enhance aerodynamic efficiency; other work by the authors demonstrates how alternating white and black pigment on wings can reduce drag. These results wi
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