There's an old adage that almost nobody who lives in New York is actually from New York. Now the same can be said about the East Coast and monarch butterflies. Researchers from Canada's University of Guelph discovered that almost 90 percent of the monarchs they sampled along the United States'...
The evolution of vision in butterflies may have led to the wide range of patterns and wing colors present in nature. Naturalists had once hypothesized that wing-color mimicry, which allowed butterflies to resemble bad-tasting relatives, emerged as a defense mechanism to confuse predators such as birds. That same disguise was...