Walk through the rainforests of Ecuador and you might encounter a beautiful butterfly called Heliconius cydno. It’s extremely varied in its colours. Even among one subspecies, H.cydno alithea, you can find individuals with white wingbands and those with yellow. Despite their different hues, they are still the same species… but probably not for much longer.
Even though the two forms are genetically similar and live in the same area, Nicola Chamberlain from Harvard University has found that one of them – the yellow version – has developed a preference for mating with butterflies of its own colour. This fussiness has set up an invisible barrier within the butterfly population, where traits that would typically separate sister species – colour and mate preferences – have started to segregate. In time, this is the sort of change that could split the single species into two.
Heliconius butterflies defend themselves with foul chemicals and advertise their distasteful arsenal with bright warning colours on their wings. The group has a penchant for diversity, and even closely related species sport different patterns. But the butterflies are also rampant mimics. Distantly related species have evolved uncanny resemblances so that their warnings complement one another – a predator that learns to avoid one species will avoid all the ones that share the same patterns. It’s a mutual protection racket, sealed with colour.
The result of this widespread mimicry is that populations of the same species can look very different because they are imitating different models. This is the case with H.cydno – the yellow form mimics the related H.eleuchia, while the white form mimics yet another species, H.sapho.
How can we be sure that the pairs of butterflies that look alike aren’t in fact more closely related? For a start, scientists have shown that the frequencies of the yellow and white versions of alithea in the wild match those of the species they mimic. Genetic testing provides the clincher. It confirms that the two mimics are indeed more closely related to each other than they are to their models.
Genetics also tells us how alithea achieves its dual coats. Colour is determined by a single gene; if a butterfly inherits the dominant version, it’s white and if it gets two copies of the recessive one, it’s yellow. Pattern is controlled in a similar way by a second gene. These variations aside, there are no distinct genetic differences between the two alithea forms. They are still very much a single population of interbreeding butterflies.
But that may change, and fussy males could be the catalyst. Chamberlain watched over 1,600 courtship rituals performed by 115 captured males. Her voyeuristic experiments showed that yellow males strongly preferred to mate with yellow females, although white males weren’t so fussy.
This isn’t just a whimsical preference – Chamberlain thinks that the colour gene sits very closely to a gene for mate preference. The two genes may even be one and the same. Either way, their proximity on the butterfly’s genome means that their fates are intertwined and they tend to be inherited as a unit. That’s certainly plausible, for the same pigments that colour the butterflies’ wings also serve to filter light arriving into their eyes. A change in the way those pigments are produced could alter both the butterfly’s appearance and how it sees others of its kind.
To see what happens when this process goes further, you don’t have to travel far. Costa Rica is home to another H.cydno subspecies called galanthus, and a closely related species called H.pachinus. They represent a further step down the road that alithea is headed down. Galanthus and H.pachinus look very different because they mimic different models – the former has white wingbands reminiscent of H.sapho, while the latter has green bands inspired by H.hewitsoni.
Nonetheless, the two species could interbreed if they ever got the chance. Two things stand in the way. The first is geography – H.cydno galanthus stays on the eastern side of the country, while H.pachinus remains on the west. The second is, as with alithea, sex appeal. Males prefer females bearing the same wing colours as they do so even if the two sexes of the two species were to cross paths, they’d probably fly right past each other.
Genetically, these species have also diverged far further than the two forms of alithea have. They differ at no less than five genes involved in colour and pattern, two of which are practically identical to the ones that causing alithea to segregate. They also provide more evidence that the genes for colour and mate preference are closely linked, for crossbreeding the two species yields offspring with half-way colours and half-way preferences.
These butterflies are by no means the only examples of speciation in the wild. In this blog alone, I’ve discussed a beautiful case study of diversity creating itself among fruit flies and parasitic wasps, explosive bursts of diversity in cichlid fish fuelled by violent males, and a giant predatory bug that’s splitting cavefish into isolated populations.
But Heliconius butterflies may be the most illuminating of all these case studies. They’re easy to capture, breed and work with. And as Chamberlain’s study shows, they can marshal together the contribution of experts in genetics, ecology, evolution and animal behaviour in an effort to understand that most magnificent of topics – the origin of species.
[This post was written as an entry for the NESCENT evolution blogging contest. For more details about this competition, visit their website.]
Reference: Science 10.1126/science.1179141
More on speciation:
- How diversity creates itself – cascades of new species among flies and parasitic wasps
- Giant insect splits cavefish into distinct populations
- Malawi cichlids – how aggressive males create diversity
November 6th, 2009 at 3:16 am
This might be an inappropriate comparison, but are you saying that if humans of different “color” only mated with each other we’d all become separate species? There’s a point for globalization I suppose.
November 6th, 2009 at 7:22 am
C’mon Ed. Anyone can see that those butterflies are glued to the trees (and to each other!)….
November 6th, 2009 at 8:13 am
I think the key phrase is “could breed if they wanted to”. I’ve seen similar attempts to show that varieties are in fact emerging species, but I don’t find it that convincing because I haven’t seen an example where one species really has become two species and not two varieties of one species.
This is an interesting example but it demonstrates variety, not speciation. I’d be very keen indeed to read any observation of actual speciation – I believe that it can and will be observed, but I wonder why we don’t seem to have yet.
November 6th, 2009 at 1:37 pm
#1: Given sufficient time, and if the mate preference was sufficiently restricted, yes, we would expect speciation to occur, eventually.
#3: There are several closely related organisms which are nearly universally accepted to be distinct species that can “breed if they wanted to”, and the hybrid offspring are fertile (though sometimes the fertility is reduced compared to the wild-type parent). But they do not typically interbreed in the wild, sometimes because their ranges don’t overlap, but sometimes, when their ranges do overlap, only because they “don’t want to”. Put them in unusual circumstances, however, (such as captivity, environmental disruption of one or both home ranges, or extreme population imbalance leading to paucity of con-specific mate choice, etc), and interbreeding does occur. Two cases I know of where hybrid offspring have been actually been documented, in the wild, are grizzly bear-polar bear, and blue whale-fin whale (I don’t know if the hybrids were over shown to be fertile in these specific cases).
Thus, for at least some recognized species, the only reproductive barrier is mate selection, exactly as it is for these butterfly varieties. So why are some recognized as species and others just as varieties? The dividing line between the two is distinctly fuzzy in some cases, and “could breed if they wanted to” is in no way a “key” phrase.
Before any population can speciate, it must first divide into varieties. The one is just a step towards the other.
November 23rd, 2009 at 12:04 am
Richard Dawkins has an interesting chapter in The Ancestor’s Tale about how things like color and other external physical differences may lead to speciation and he contemplates whether these differences in humans would be tantamount to the types of separation that lead to divergence among species sharing a common ancestor. The butterflies seem to support this idea.