Forewing pigmentation predicts migration distance in wild-caught migratory monarch butterflies
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Surprisingly, little is known about how the environment influences the production of the iconic orange coloration of the monarch butterfly (Danaus plexippus). Previous research under controlled laboratory conditions has shown that the temperature during larval development influences the color of monarch wings, where females raised in warm conditions had a greater proportion of melanization, whereas males raised in warm conditions had a lower proportion of melanization. These melanin-based colors have been found to increase flying ability in Lepidoptera, and recent experiments have found that monarchs with redder forewings flew greater distances than monarchs with less intense coloration. We examined whether wild-caught monarchs captured in the Great Lakes region exhibited geographic polyphenism by using stable isotopes to estimate natal origin, and hence rearing temperature, spectrophotometry to measure forewing coloration, and image analysis to estimate shape. We found that monarchs from the Gulf Coast were more melanized than monarchs from the Great Lakes, and southern male monarchs were more saturated than northern male monarchs. This supports previous research suggesting that colors that absorb more solar energy allow for greater flying ability but contradicts the patterns we expected based on natal temperature. Interestingly, this effect of color on migration distance was independent of wing shape. We provide the first evidence that the coloration of wild monarchs influences their migration ability over a continental scale, and we suggest that these differences in color may benefit the cohort of monarchs destined for long-distance migration to their wintering ground.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".