Olfaction is in many species the most important sense, essential for food search, mate finding, and predator avoidance. Butterflies have been considered a microsmatic group of insects that mainly rely on vision due to their diurnal lifestyle. However, an emerging number of studies indicate that butterflies indeed use the sense of smell for locating food and oviposition sites. To unravel the neu...

In the present study few indigenous techniques of biodiversity assessment butterflies were practiced in some forest ecosystems Bangladesh. Butterfly-plant interaction a ecosystem is dynamic key factor that determines status forest. A research team Environmental Biology and Biodiversity Laboratory (EBBL) department Zoology, Dhaka University worked successfully on population census forests by usi...

Satyrinae butterflies (Lepidoptera: Nymphalidae) and grasses (Poaceae) are very diverse and distributed worldwide. Most Satyrinae use grasses as host plants, but the temporal scale of this tight association is not known. Here, we present a phylogenetic study of Satyrinae butterflies and related groups, based on 5.1 kilobases from six gene regions and 238 morphological characters for all major l...

Members of the diverse butterfly families Nymphalidae (brush-footed butterflies) and Riodinidae (metalmarks) have reduced first thoracic limbs and only use two pairs of legs for walking. In order to address questions about the detailed morphology and evolutionary origins of these reduced limbs, the three thoracic limbs of 13 species of butterflies representing all six butterfly families were ex...

The diverse Müllerian mimetic wing patterns of neotropical Heliconius (Nymphalidae) have been proposed to be not only aposematic signals to potential predators, but also intraand interspecific recognition signals that allow the butterflies to maintain their specific identities, and which perhaps drive the process of speciation, as well. Adaptive features under differential selection that also s...

The use of DNA sequence data often leads to the recognition of cryptic species within putatively well-known taxa. The opposite case, detecting less diversity than originally described, has, however, far more rarely been documented. Maniola jurtina, the Meadow Brown butterfly, occurs all over Europe, whereas all other six species in the genus Maniola are restricted to the Mediterranean area. Amo...

While Anartia butterflies have served as model organisms for research on the genetics of speciation, no phylogeny has been published to describe interspecific relationships. Here, we present a molecular phylogenetic analysis of Anartia species relationships, using both mitochondrial and nuclear genes. Analyses of both data sets confirm earlier predictions of sister species pairings based primar...

Three species of Pampasatyrus Hayward, 1953 (Satyrinae, Pronophilina) are transferred to Stegosatyrus n. gen. (Euptychiina) based on morphological evidence: S. imbrialis (Weeks, 1901) n. comb. from Bolivia (Cochabamba) and northern Argentina; S. ocelloides (Schaus, 1902) n. comb. from Paraguay (Hernandarias and Caaguazú) and Brazil (Midwest, Southeast and South regions); and S. periphas (Godart...