Entomologist team discovers reason behind passion-vine butterfly congregation tendencies
Thursday, March 22, 2012 - 09:03
in Biology & Nature
(PhysOrg.com) -- Susan Finkbeiner, entomologist and graduate student at the University of California Irvine and colleagues Adriana Briscoe and Robert Reed have discovered the reason behind the passion-vine butterflies tendency to band together in small groups when they bed down for the night. They say, in their paper published in Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, that it’s to ward off predators, not to communicate, as some have speculated.