Geographically referenced faunal surveys are essential for land managers, conservation biologists, and entomologists to understand the distribution and diversity of organisms in the landscape. Further, the provision of faunal surveys through online and interactive mapping tools may generate new insights into species occurrence and location, ultimately leading to better informed decisions about how best to manage these species and their habitats. With these considerations in mind, we developed Weevil Viewer, an online, interactive mapping application for displaying the results of a faunal survey conducted on the four primitive weevil families found in Wisconsin. Design of Weevil Viewer was informed by Shneiderman's information seeking mantra, providing a pair of map overviews that can be filtered or zoomed iteratively by species, location, and time to glean new insights into the faunal distribution and diversity as well as to identify potential sites for future surveys. Weevil Viewer continues to be populated with new survey information and serves as a proof-of-concept application that can be extended to support the visual exploration of other biodiversity surveys.

The striking structural variation seen in arthropod visual systems can be explained by availability of light within habitats coupled with developmental and physiological constraints. However, little is currently known about how fine-scale variation in visual structures arise across shorter evolutionary and ecological scales. In this study, we characterise patterns of interspecific, intraspecific and intraindividual variation in the visual system of four ithomiine butterfly species. These species are part of a diverse Neotropical radiation where changes in mimetic colouration are associated with fine-scale shifts in ecology, such as microhabitat preference. By using a combination of selection analyses on visual opsin sequences, in-vivo ophthalmoscopy, micro-computed tomography (micro-CT), immunohistochemistry, confocal microscopy, and neural tracing, we quantify and describe physiological, anatomical, and molecular traits involved in visual processing. Using these data, we provide evidence of substantial variation within the visual systems of Ithomiini, including i) habitat-associated relaxed selection on visual opsins, ii) interspecific shifts in visual system physiology and anatomy, and iii) extensive sexual dimorphism, including the complete absence of a butterfly-specific optic neuropil in the males of some species. We conclude that considerable visual system variation can exist within diverse insect radiations, hinting at the evolutionary lability of these systems to rapidly develop specialisations to distinct visual ecologies, with selection acting at both the perceptual, processing, and molecular level.