Document Detail


Intensity contrast as a crucial cue for butterfly landing.
MedLine Citation:
PMID:  21847617     Owner:  NLM     Status:  Publisher    
Abstract/OtherAbstract:
Papilio butterflies use a tetrachromatic color vision to discriminate a rewarding flower, approach, land and take nectar from the flower. In the course of further analyzing their foraging behavior in a laboratory condition, we found that some butterflies could not land on the target flower even they discriminated and tried to land on it, especially when the target was dark. This phenomenon, which we call "landing suppression", indicates that the cue for landing differs from the cue for visually locating a flower. We hypothesized that a possible cue for landing was intensity contrast between the target and background, and have initiated to test this hypothesis. We tested the butterflies' landing behavior to targets of various colors and intensities presented on background of black or various densities of gray. As a result, the landing was most strongly suppressed when the intensity contrast was close to zero irrespective of the target colors, suggesting that the butterflies used the target-background intensity contrast when landing.
Authors:
Hisaharu Koshitaka; Kentaro Arikawa; Michiyo Kinoshita
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Publication Detail:
Type:  JOURNAL ARTICLE     Date:  2011-8-17
Journal Detail:
Title:  Journal of comparative physiology. A, Neuroethology, sensory, neural, and behavioral physiology     Volume:  -     ISSN:  1432-1351     ISO Abbreviation:  -     Publication Date:  2011 Aug 
Date Detail:
Created Date:  2011-8-17     Completed Date:  -     Revised Date:  -    
Medline Journal Info:
Nlm Unique ID:  101141792     Medline TA:  J Comp Physiol A Neuroethol Sens Neural Behav Physiol     Country:  -    
Other Details:
Languages:  ENG     Pagination:  -     Citation Subset:  -    
Affiliation:
Graduate School of Integrated Sciences, Yokohama City University, 22-2 Seto, Kanazawa-ku, Yokohama, 236-0027, Japan.
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