Behaviour before beauty: Signal weighting during mate selection in the butterfly Papilio polytes.
Male Papilio polytes, an Asian swallowtail butterfly with female-limited polymorphism and Batesian mimicry, have context dependent mate preferences. In collaboration with Augustana University, SD, the University of Chicago, IL, and Butterfly House and Aquarium, SD, we show that males prefer to court females who are actively flying, and when courting flying females, they prefer to court females with non-mimetic wing patterns. These courting preferences differ from what we see when males are only presented with stationary females- in this context males prefer to court mimetic females (Westerman et al, 2018). When we combine the results from these two studies, we see that male preference for female wing pattern is context dependent, and may contribute to the maintenance of these two female forms in nature. Link to Westerman et al, Ethology (2019).