Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent six days a week. Terms of Service and Privacy Policy. Spatial learning is an important and complex skill in the animal ...

Mimicry is a classic (and classical) biological phenomenon, the appreciation of which dates to the time when biology was more accurately called "natural history" and was more diversion for English ...

Competition for mates has substantial effects on sensory systems and often leads to the evolution of extraordinary mating behaviours in nature. The ability of males to find sexually immature females ...

About a decade ago, evolutionary biologist Richard Merrill would spend several hours a day in “hot, steamy Panama,” sitting in a cage filled with Heliconius butterflies, waiting for them to have sex. ...

Heliconius charithonia is one of the species of butterflies whose wing patterns scientists scrutinized to better understand the evolutionary process. This butterfly is wild-type; the genetically ...

The study, which appears in the journal Molecular Biology and Evolution, offers new insights into these selective environmental pressures that guide butterfly eye evolution. Led by Adriana D. Briscoe, ...

Melissa Breyer was Treehugger’s senior editorial director before moving to Martha Stewart. Her writing and photography have been featured in The New York Times, The Guardian, National Geographic, ...

Heliconius butterflies are capable of spatial learning, scientists have discovered. The results provide the first experimental evidence of spatial learning in any butterfly or moth species. The ...

Amazonian Heliconius butterflies have a distinctive coloring, known as the “dennis red patch” and the “ray red streaks” on each side of the wing. These colors come from different genes that derived ...

Pooling funds and putting their heads together, more than 70 scientists from 9 institutions including the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute, sequenced the entire genome of the butterfly genus ...

A chemical produced by the male genitals of this tropical butterfly is so repulsive, scientists refer to it as an “anti-aphrodisiac.” New research published today in PLOS Biology describes the genetic ...

Heliconius butterflies are capable of spatial learning, scientists have discovered. The results provide the first experimental evidence of spatial learning in any butterfly or moth species. Heliconius ...