The secret world of insects — Introducing Morpho butterflies

Nature has incredible things out there. Volcanoes, mountains, big whales, blue birds, waterfalls, stars and you. Undoubtedly, in between them, there are the insects. The largest — and I would rather say the most interesting — group of animals on earth. These tiny creatures live in a particular world: they can walk on the water, fly above the sky, or dig under the ground. Live for years or for hours. To be three in one when there is metamorphose. But still, it can be very hard to see all of that.

Humans do have an inherent difficult to fairly perceive the insects. We are big and extravagant primates, which have huge heads and walk on two legs. Insects are small. That is the truth. There is an abyss between the human scale and the insect scale. We have to take a close and deep look to be able to understand all their secrets — or to try.

In this text, which is an attempt to calling attention to this frequently unfamiliar world, I chose to talk about the Morpho butterflies. Certainly they are not so small, what may make them to have the potential to be as popular as rock stars. Indeed, Morpho are charismatic.

But who are the Morpho butterflies? They are large-sized Lepidoptera with iridescent coloration. Their structural color can be a shocking blue, which may surprise us meters away. Objectively, they are beautiful to the human taste. If we have some patterns about personal taste, Morpho would probably be a common feature. About the geographical range, the butterflies fly on the Neotropical region, comprehending Mexico through Argentina. And nicely, they can be relatively common in the rain forests. Currently, there is disagreement about how much species are included in the genus. Some say 75, others 29. It happens sometimes. Taxonomists are always fighting. And they will always be. Even Charles Darwin did not know what a species is. Or a subspecies. Or a variety. They have to argue.

It was published in the well-respected scientific journal “Systematic Entomology” a comprehensive review about the classification of Morpho. Carla Penz, who makes the University of New Orleans her workplace, has spent more than one decade studying the diversity of these butterflies. Now, she and her colleagues put together the morphological and molecular evidence to advance in the understanding of the diversification of Morpho.

In the paper, they evaluated the relationships between 21 species. The tree, which is used as the picture of life, has four groups or clades. The results suggest that Morpho probably originated during the Oligocene (about 25 to 30 million years ago) in the eastern Andean region. Most of the lineages would seem to have arising during the late Miocene (5 to 10 million years ago). As the authors wrote: “ the most significant period of diversification of Morpho began with a larval host plant switch to eudicots [a group of plants] (about 20 million years ago), followed by a male behavioral shift to using predominantly gliding flight to occupy the forest canopy (about 13 million years ago)”. The paper follows with more interesting finds in a long and nice discussion. They conclude that many more work can be done, especially about the ecology of larval host plant association, diversification in species complexes and studying of mating behavior.

Finally, I wrote all of that just to say: Morpho are cool.

Liked the text? I’d really appreciate to hear your thoughts on it!

(photo by Anderson Rabello Pereira)