Both species-specific traits and landscape configuration, such as area and connectivity of habitat patches plus the character of uninhabitable matrix, affect animal movements in fragmented landscapes. Difficulties with disentangling species-specific and landscape effects have obscured comparisons among species, hindering the understanding of dispersal in metapopulations. To circumvent this complication, we performed a mark-recapture study of four related nymphalid butterflies within identical landscape and in single season. The studied species were three Melitaeinae checkerspots (Euphydryas aurinia, Melitaea athalia, Melitaea diamina) and one Argynnini fritillary (Brenthis ino). Applying the Virtual Migration model revealed that (1) except for mortality within habitat, model parameters differed from those found for the studied species elsewhere; (2) the three Melitaeinae species were more akin in movement parameters than the Argynnini representative (i.e., B. ino); (3) within Melitaeinae, differences between sexes were more prominent than differences among species; (4) Melitaeinae males left natal patches more readily than females, while the opposite applied to B. ino; (5) males of M. diamina and both sexes of B. ino exhibited highest values of dispersal mortality; (6) except for females of M. diamina and both sexes of B. ino, immigration and emigration scaled with area in females but not in males. Finding (1) demonstrates that geometry of habitat network affects mobility considerably and that transferring dispersal parameters across systems is unwarranted. Still, (2-6) demonstrate that within identical networks, related species follow similar dispersal patterns, suggesting that conservation scenarios suitable for a well-studied model species would suite related species as well.

A pertinent question in animal population ecology is the relationship between population abundance, density, and mobility. Two extreme ways to reach sufficient abundance for long-term persistence are to inhabit restricted locations at high densities, or large areas in low densities. The former case predicts low individual mobility, whereas the later predicts high one. This assumption is rarely tested using across-species comparisons, due to scarcity of data on both mobility and population sizes for multiple species. We used data on dispersal and local population densities of six butterfly species gained by mark-recapture, and data on their (relative) regional abundance obtained by walking transects in a landscape surrounding the mark-recapture sites. We correlated both local density and regional abundance against slopes of the inverse power function, appropriate for describing the shape of dispersal kernel. Local densities correlated negatively with the dispersal kernel slopes both when sexes were treated as independent data points and if treated together. For regional abundance, the correlation was also negative but only marginally significant. Our results corroborate the notion that a trade-off exists between living in dense populations and having poor dispersal, and vice versa. We link this observation to resource use by individual species, and distribution of such resources as host plants in the study landscape.