Peacock Butterfly Dance Paper

Question 1

What are eye spots for on peacock butterflies?

Answer 1

Defence against predators

Question 2

What are some criticisms of the peacock butterfly paper?

Answer 2

Need for a better study

Question 3

What two forms of defence do peacock butterflies have? What does this paper set out to experiment?

Answer 3

Exposing eye spots and hissing by rubbing fore and hindwings together

Study aims to determine the defensive effect of eyespots and hissing together and separately

Question 4

How were the treatments of this experiment set up?

Answer 4

6 different ones

Eyespots could be removed by a black marker pen - the control was marking parts of the wings without eyespots

To remove hissing, could cut away the lower edge of the forewing - the control for this was to cut lower edge of the hindwing (not involved in making hissing sound)

Each bird was only given one butterfly and each butterfly was only gievn to one bird

Question 5

What were the main results from the peacock butterfly experiment?

Answer 5

Eyespots greatly reduced predation risk - 9/9 survived with eyespots and 5/10 survived without eyespots

Hissing or no hissing made no difference on predation risk - 8/8 survived who couldn’t hiss and 7/8 survived who could - NOT SIGNIFICANT

For those that had eyespots and could hiss, 9/9 survived and those who could do neither only 2/10 survived

Data shows eyespots greatly reduce predation risk and hissing has no effect at least against blue tits

Question 6

What can you interpret from the data shown in figure 3 of the peacock butterfly paper?

Answer 6

Butterfly will open wing to an approaching bird at a greater distance on the second encounter than the first

Supports the hypothesis that they rely initially on camouflage for defence