Finding the way home: movement of butterflies in non-familiar habitats

• Autor(a) principal: Morais, Vanessa Rodrigues de
• Data de Publicação: 2015
• Tipo de documento: Dissertação
• Idioma: por
• Título da fonte: Repositório Institucional da UFRN
• Texto Completo: https://repositorio.ufrn.br/jspui/handle/123456789/20505
• topic: CNPQ::CIENCIAS BIOLOGICAS::ECOLOGIA; Habitat fragmentation; Naïve; Butterfly; Heliconius erato; Perceptual range

Natural landscapes have been dramatically affected by habitat loss and fragmentation, which transform continuous forest in habitat patches imbedded in areas of non-habitat (matrices). This matrices, inhospitable or not, affect countless ecological process, like dispersal. One of the ways to understand this effect of matrix on dispersal is studying animal’s perceptual range. Which is a range at which an animal perceive landscape elements. This perception is directly connected to the success to reach a new habitat patch while animals navigate through matrix. To contribute to this knowledge we evaluate the habitat perception of Heliconius erato. However, we were also interest in evaluate the effect of butterflies age and matrix type on its perception. Consequently, we raised butterflies on laboratory and matched with butterflies from forest during a release experiment. To determinate perceptual range, we did releases in two different matrices at three distances from forest (0, 30 and 100 meters) and measured the final angle reached for butterflies. We found that: I) butterflies released in edge were strongly oriented to forest; II) than higher the release distance the lower perceptual ability and III) there is an interaction between age and matrix type. Naïve butterflies oriented better on open field (perceptual range: 30-100 meters and experienced oriented better at coconut plantation (perceptual range: 30-100 meters).