ArticleScientific reports2019
Colour lightness of butterfly assemblages across North America and Europe.
Article in Scientific reports, 2019. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 33 papers.
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Who cites it
33 citing papers in PubMed.
- Vertical Distribution of Butterfly Community (Lepidoptera) and Its Drivers on Mount Gongga, Western China.Insects · 2026Article
- Soaring Systematics: An Evaluation of Biogeography and Flight Behavior in Dragonflies and Damselflies (Insecta: Odonata) Using Phylogenomics.Systematic biology · 2026Article
- Different Scales, Different Rules: How Do Temperature and Radiation Across Macro- and Microclimate Shape Forest Insect Traits?Ecology and evolution · 2026Article
- Seasonal climatic variability shapes immune responses and infection risks in the common bluetail damselfly.Oecologia · 2026Article
- Detecting local adaptation under weak genetic structure in an endemic damselfly: an integrative eco-evolutionary approach.BMC ecology and evolution · 2026Article
- Structural background of intraspecific color polymorphism and the driver of geographic patterns in a shining leaf chafer.Frontiers in zoology · 2025Article
- Environmental Variation Contributes to Head Phenotypes in Workers ofEcology and evolution · 2025Article
- Wing spot in a tropical and a temperate drosophilid: C = C enrichment and conserved thermal response.BMC ecology and evolution · 2025Article
- Article
- A multicontinental dataset of butterfly thermal physiological traits.Scientific data · 2024Article
- Polarization and reflectance are linked to climate, size and mechanistic constraints in a group of scarab beetles.Scientific reports · 2024Article
- Eco-Morphological Responses ofInsects · 2024Article
- Current evidence of climate-driven colour change in insects and its impact on sexual signals.Ecology and evolution · 2024Review
- A straightforward protocol to sample morphological traits of dragonflies and damselflies in the field.Ecology and evolution · 2024Article
- The global importance and interplay of colour-based protective and thermoregulatory functions in frogs.Nature communications · 2023Article
- Seasonal variation in dragonfly assemblage colouration suggests a link between thermal melanism and phenology.Nature communications · 2023Article
- Modeling the extinction risk of European butterflies and odonates.Ecology and evolution · 2022Article
- Thermobiological effects of temperature-induced color variations inEcology and evolution · 2022Article
- Global biogeography of warning coloration in the butterflyBiology letters · 2022Article
- Article
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7 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Melanin-based dark colouration is beneficial for insects as it increases the absorption of solar energy and protects against pathogens. Thus, it is expected that insect colouration is darker in colder regions and in regions with high humidity, where it is assumed that pathogen pressure is highest. These relationships between colour lightness, insect distribution, and climate between taxa and subtaxa across continents have never been tested and compared. Here we analysed the colour lightness of nearly all butterfly species of North America and Europe using the average colour lightness of species occurring within 50 km × 50 km grid cells across both continents as the dependent variable and average insolation, temperature and humidity within grid cells as explanatory variables. We compared the direction, strength and shape of these relationships between butterfly families and continents. On both continents, butterfly assemblages in colder and more humid regions were generally darker coloured than assemblages in warmer and less humid regions. Although these relationships differed in detail between families, overall trends within families on both continents were similar. Our results add further support for the importance of insect colour lightness as a mechanistic adaptation to climate that influences biogeographical patterns of species distributions.
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