Above: Filming in action, from left: Maddy Mengel, Carol Boggs, Ruchao Qian, Dan Speiser, and Yash Sondhi. Photo by Eric Phillips

One of RMBL’s strengths is that it facilitates collaborations in the field. Who can resist an invitation to spend a week on a joint project, high in the Rocky Mountains?   

For us, one collaboration this past summer began at a professional meeting last January, with a conversation among my graduate students, a co-principal investigator on our grant, me, and a faculty member from Case Western Reserve University. My lab and my co-PI are studying the visual ecology of the Mormon fritillary butterfly’s mating behavior. Females that are well fed as larvae have more orange wings, which attract males that are looking for mates. My students and I gave talks at the meeting about responses of male butterflies to differently colored decoy “butterflies” made of square Pantone color chips. Our work at RMBL showed that males preferred decoys that are the same color as females that are well fed as larvae. Further, silver spots on the underside of the wings reflect light back through the wings, amplifying the orange color on the wing upper sides; that amplified color is even more attractive to males. Finally, the black patterning on the wings affects male color perception, such that amplified orange spots are effective only when they are surrounded by black markings. 

Yash Sondhi, an assistant professor at Case Western, suggested that we could use his 3D high-speed video cameras to track male flight patterns. This would tell us about the distance at which males perceive the different decoys, and the distance at which they realize that a decoy is not a butterfly. This in turn tells us about visual acuity and its interaction with color and pattern. 

Before we knew it, we had signed up not only Yash, but also Ruchao Qian, a doctoral student in Jamie Theobald’s lab at Florida International University, and two filmmakers, Mark Unger from WonderLab and Shaffer Nickel from Crested Butte, to come out to Gothic along with my co-PI, Dan Speiser, a visual ecologist from the University of South Carolina, and his family. They all showed up in late July, and the lack of a serious monsoon this past summer allowed us to get an excellent set of videos, which we’re currently analyzing. 

But the serendipity continued. One of my doctoral students, Maddy Mengel, was rooming at RMBL with two members of Cassie Stoddard’s lab at Princeton University. Kristina Fialko, a postdoctoral researcher in the Stoddard lab, was taking hyperspectral photos of hummingbird habitat. Her camera takes pictures in which each pixel contains the spectra of the light in that pixel, to an amazing 2-nanometer resolution.  

We’d been puzzling over a good way to examine the color differences in detail across our butterfly’s wings — this could solve our dilemma! And Kristina was very interested in 3D high-speed videos of her hummingbirds’ behavior. So we arranged a trade: videos of hummers for photos of butterflies. 

These collaborations will likely continue: Yash may propose a new project on moths at RMBL next summer, Maddy wants to expand on the 3D video work, and she may also travel to Cassie’s lab to expand on the hyperspectral photography. And Dan, who is actually a marine molluscan visual ecologist, was fascinated enough by RMBL and its environs that he and his family are thinking of returning as visitors. 

I’ve long thought that we should alter the sign at the road entrance to RMBL to say, “Surgeon General’s warning: May be addictive.” It’s true!