Procurando contribuir para o levantamento sistemático e o conhecimento das borboletas da Mata Atlântica do Rio Grande do Sul, foram realizadas saídas bimestrais em quatro localidades no vale do rio Maquiné, entre junho de 2001 e agosto de 2002. Foi elaborada uma listagem com 292 espécies de borboletas, sendo destas 42 registros novos para o Rio Grande do Sul e sete espécies raras e/ou indicadoras de ambiente preservado.

No abstract

Butterflies are a diverse and charismatic insect group that are thought to have evolved with plants and dispersed throughout the world in response to key geological events. However, these hypotheses have not been extensively tested because a comprehensive phylogenetic framework and datasets for butterfly larval hosts and global distributions are lacking. We sequenced 391 genes from nearly 2,300 butterfly species, sampled from 90 countries and 28 specimen collections, to reconstruct a new phylogenomic tree of butterflies representing 92% of all genera. Our phylogeny has strong support for nearly all nodes and demonstrates that at least 36 butterfly tribes require reclassification. Divergence time analyses imply an origin ~100 million years ago for butterflies and indicate that all but one family were present before the K/Pg extinction event. We aggregated larval host datasets and global distribution records and found that butterflies are likely to have first fed on Fabaceae and originated in what is now the Americas. Soon after the Cretaceous Thermal Maximum, butterflies crossed Beringia and diversified in the Palaeotropics. Our results also reveal that most butterfly species are specialists that feed on only one larval host plant family. However, generalist butterflies that consume two or more plant families usually feed on closely related plants.

Wild primates that live in urban areas face extreme threats that are less frequent in nonurban fragments, such as the presence of dangerous matrix elements (e.g., roads, power lines, buildings, and a high density of domestic dogs near food patches), that could influence their movements, feeding behavior, and survival. However, the scarcity of studies addressing this issue hinders our understanding of the behavioral adjustments that favor the survival of primates in urban areas. For 12 months, we studied a six-individual group of brown howlers (Alouatta guariba clamitans) in an urban fragment to determine (i) their diet richness and its relationships with food availability, (ii) their daily path length (DPL) and the matrix elements used during movement, and (iii) the main ecological drivers of the DPL. Sampling effort totaled 72 days, 787 hr, and 3,224 instantaneous scans. We found that the diet of brown howlers contained 35 plant species (including seven cultivated crops) belonging to 33 genera and 21 families. The consumption of fruits and young leaves was directly related to their temporal availability. The average DPL (446 m) was smaller than that reported for groups of howlers inhabiting large nonurban fragments. To move between food patches, animals used three main matrix elements: trees, power lines, and roofs. The number of plant species used during the day was the main driver of DPL. Our findings highlighted that the generalist-opportunistic diet of brown howlers and their ability to move across the anthropogenic matrix using artificial elements such as power lines, roofs, and wildlife crossings represent a remarkable part of their behavioral repertory in Lami. However, there are potential costs associated with these strategies, namely, electrocution and predation by domestic dogs. Thus, it is urgent to further investigate how these behaviors could affect the long-term survival of these animals.

Male butterflies in the hyperdiverse tribe Eumaeini possess an unusually complex and diverse repertoire of secondary sexual characteristics involved in pheromone production and dissemination. Maintaining multiple sexually selected traits is likely to be metabolically costly, potentially resulting in trade-offs in the evolution of male signals. However, a phylogenetic framework to test hypotheses regarding the evolution and maintenance of male sexual traits in Eumaeini has been lacking. Here, we infer a comprehensive, time-calibrated phylogeny from 379 loci for 187 species representing 91% of the 87 described genera. Eumaeini is a monophyletic group that originated in the late Oligocene and underwent rapid radiation in the Neotropics. We examined specimens of 818 of the 1096 described species (75%) and found that secondary sexual traits are present in males of 91% of the surveyed species. Scent pads and scent patches on the wings and brush organs associated with the genitalia were probably present in the common ancestor of Eumaeini and are widespread throughout the tribe. Brush organs and scent pads are negatively correlated across the phylogeny, exhibiting a trade-off in which lineages with brush organs are unlikely to regain scent pads and vice versa . In contrast, scent patches seem to facilitate the evolution of scent pads, although they are readily lost once scent pads have evolved. Our results illustrate the complex interplay between natural and sexual selection in the origin and maintenance of multiple male secondary sexual characteristics and highlight the potential role of sexual selection spurring diversification in this lineage.