In people's eyes, the double-flying butterflies are like a loving couple, and their love has been enthusiastically praised by countless poets throughout the ages. "Liang Zhuhua Butterfly" is the most prestigious legend about butterflies, pinning people's yearning for the eternal existence of love. So, how do butterflies attract the opposite sex?
The inter-flowered Pei returns to the double butterfly
"Flower Pei Hui double butterfly, pool side Gu step two Mandarin ducks", in the Tang Dynasty poet Liu Xiyi's "Gongzi Xing", pairs of butterflies and Mandarin ducks are just as beautiful symbols of love.
Butterflies have a short lifespan, and most butterflies only survive for a week or two after feathering. In order to successfully complete the sacred mission of passing on the seeds, the butterfly must race against the clock to communicate with the individual in order to be the mate of the phaser, and the body color and pattern are extremely important information elements. In order to survive, many butterflies hide themselves through protective colors or mimetics, but in order to reproduce, they often attract the favor of the opposite sex through their performance of highlights.
"Pink plum white is new, and it can be done before the dance." In order to meet their favorite opposite sex, most male butterflies will roam the place where the female butterfly breaks out of the cocoon. Butterflies have a pair of eyes to identify the ideal partner, and they know that appearance is a simplified sign of whether an individual is physically strong and whether the genes are good. The richer the color and the more colorful the pattern, the younger, healthier and sexier the male butterfly. Female butterflies are only willing to marry "handsome guys" with full wings and bright colors, and are not willing to take care of guys with broken wings and sloppy clothes.
The two-sex alien old leopard butterfly, the male butterfly likes to show off the orange pattern that is much more gorgeous than the female butterfly during the mating season, it seems to be competing with the flowers, but in fact, it is a hint to the female butterfly that in the dangerous natural world, she can swim freely and live because of her powerful genes. Darwin proposed the concept of sexual selection with special consideration for butterflies: "Butterflies are arranged and presented in color and exquisite patterns as if they were specially designed to show off. I therefore believe that males with more vivid colors are usually more likely to win the female's favor or most arouse their interest. ”
Special colored wings are conducive to male and female butterflies to quickly find each other in the multitude of sentient beings. Singaporean scholars have confirmed that a certain sleeve butterfly living in the Amazon rainforest is interested in any red object, and even if you wave a red handkerchief, you can attract a group of male sleeve butterflies.
Many animals in nature are born with visual systems that are unattainable to the human eye, and some butterflies can identify the opposite sex through ultraviolet light. In the human eye, the small yellow butterflies are all the same bright yellow, but the yellow scales on the surface of the male butterfly's wings can reflect ultraviolet rays, while the female butterfly cannot, so in the eyes of the small yellow butterfly, the male butterfly is more vivid. As the male butterfly grows older, the scales on the wings of the male butterfly continue to fall off, and the ability to reflect ultraviolet light gradually decreases, and the attraction to the female butterfly decreases.
Jungle squinting brown butterfly native to Africa will cause the adult courtship spots to reflect different ultraviolet rays due to the different living environments of the larval stage, so which of the female and male active courtship is determined by the birth season.
During the rainy season, males chase females and court females by showing off the gleaming eye-shaped spots on their wings. However, the spots on the wings of the feathered females in the dry season reflect more and brighter ultraviolet rays, and the male becomes the object of pursuit, and the females use the same dance posture as the males in the rainy season to offer their favor to "Prince Charming". Some species of butterflies can also use the polarized light reflected on their wings to lure the opposite sex and find a lover.
Butterflies are more visually equipped than humans and have a wider field of view than humans. Not only are they able to distinguish between ultraviolet, near-infrared, and polarized light, but they are also good at perceiving fast-moving objects. Mimicking the butterfly's vision system, American scientists have designed a camera with small weight, low cost and sensitive fluorescence detection. Under standard operating room lighting conditions, the camera not only provides surgeons with traditional color images, but also near-infrared fluorescence information, helping doctors see fluorescently labeled cancer cells clearly and accurately remove them.
Drunken East Wind Weed Flowers
Bright colors aren't the only temptation, butterflies also use odor signals to identify them. In 1959, German chemists Peter Carson and Marin Luchu successfully isolated and identified the first insect information compound, silkworm moth alcohol, and proposed the term "pheromone".
Pheromones, also called exohormones, are a precise chemical communication language for insect communication, in which sexual pheromones (i.e., extrasexual hormones) are compounds that regulate the attraction behavior of females and males in insects, with a special odor, long duration, long distance of action, and strong allure. Most insects are females who produce extrageric hormones to lure males to mate, but glass-winged butterflies are in the minority.
In the forests of Central and South America surrounded by predators, the glass-winged butterfly does not dare to make a splash, it must always be cautious and use transparent wings to stealth. Even in order to attract females, the glass-winged butterfly only uses air to convey the message of love, and the pheromones it releases have a unique smell that the predator cannot see, touch, or smell, but the female butterfly can get a lot of valuable information from it, including how many toxic plant components have accumulated in the body of the suitor of the opposite sex that make it difficult for the predator to swallow. If the male releases pheromones to show that she is a robust suitor, the female chases the scent of the opposite sex. The male glass-winged butterfly cleverly attracts the opposite sex and wins the same-sex competition, but does not attract the attention of predators at all.
Once the other party's intentions are perceived, the unmarried female leads the male butterfly to fly to the place where the leaves are dense or the flowers are blooming, "the butterflies both enter the cauliflower", and the courtship activity enters the stage of dancing and affectionate "marriage flight". If Lang has a concubine intention, the female butterfly will spread her wings and stop on the branches, and the male butterfly will quickly flap her wings and do everything in her power to fly up and down around the female butterfly tirelessly. Thereafter, the dark-hearted female closes her wings, while the male gently clamps the female's antennae with her wings, touches the female's tentacles with the brush-like structure protruding from the tail end of the abdomen, and releases extratrophotogens. The relative surface area of the brush is large, which facilitates the rapid volatilization and delivery of extratrophic hormones.
After the female butterfly smells the aromatic smell of the male butterfly and receives the call of love transmitted by the extrasexual hormone, she will shyly lie still on the flowers and plants and wait for mating. Most male butterflies in the courtship full of passion around the "person in mind" floating dance, and constantly collide, scratch, slap female butterfly, because different species of butterflies emit different parts of extranaminal hormones, so their courtship dance and rituals are also unique, some exquisite and complex, some sloppy and ordinary.
The Southern Song Dynasty poets have a well-thought-out poem "envy him for the double butterflies, drunk on the east wind wild grass flowers", envy the carefree butterflies, indulge in the spring breeze and the flowers and plants, in fact, the real male and female butterflies are both intoxicated by the wild grass flowers, but the pheromones. Using the properties of pheromones, someone has created a butterfly spray containing extratrophic hormones, which can be sprayed on the clothes that people carry with them to attract butterflies to fly over for people to see.