Journal
PROCEEDINGS OF THE ROYAL SOCIETY B-BIOLOGICAL SCIENCES
Volume 274, Issue 1613, Pages 1043-1047Publisher
ROYAL SOCIETY
DOI: 10.1098/rspb.2006.0043
Keywords
female mate choice; Hypolimnas; Lepidoptera; ornamentation; sexual selection; ultraviolet
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Butterflies are among nature's most colourful animals, and provide a living showcase for how extremely bright, chromatic and iridescent coloration can be generated by complex optical mechanisms. The gross characteristics of male butterfly colour patterns are understood to function for species and/or sex recognition, but it is not known whether female mate choice promotes visual exaggeration of this coloration. Here I show that females of the sexually dichromatic species Hypolimnas bolina prefer conspecific males that possess bright iridescent blue/ultraviolet dorsal ornamentation. In separate field and enclosure experiments, using both dramatic and graded wing colour manipulations, I demonstrate that a moderate qualitative reduction in signal brightness and chromaticity has the same consequences as removing the signal entirely. These findings validate a long-held hypothesis, and argue for the importance of intra- versus interspecific selection as the driving force behind the exaggeration of bright, iridescent butterfly colour patterns.
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