Marisia - Maros Megyei Múzeum Évkönyve 35/2. (2015)

Zoology

Petru-Vasile ISTRATE, Roxana COSMA

colored in dark maroon. Their scales are covered with dense and woolly hairs, as all the other butterflies from their family [18].

Saturnia tyrrhena is a huge butterfly which can be seen all over the tropical zone of the African continent. Their fore wings show two triangular zones which do not have scales. Regarding the posterior wings, they both have on their back side one big ocelli that has its exterior ring painted black and the interior one painted blue.

Saturnia vacuna is a butterfly which is called “cobras head” due to both their wings’ shape and the drawing that resembles the head of a cobra snake which is displayed on the top of the fore wings. Each wing has an elongated stain on its back side that is actually a deformed ocelli. When the butterfly rests, the fore wings don’t overlap the posterior ones.

Imbrasia truncata has a huge ocelli on the top of their posterior wings, consisting of a ring which is colored in white, orange and dark. This species overlaps its posterior wings when it rests.

Antheraea yamamai is the Japanese Bombyx mori. Silk is a material which can hardly be painted but is really flexible and tough. These days, there were some specimens that escaped the farms and their descendants can be found in the oak forests from Central Europe. This species has one ocelli on each wing; however, the ones from the posterior wings are bigger. The wings are pained in dark maroon, while the light maroon tint of the ocelli makes them seem very prominent. There is a great variety of color regarding this species, but the one present in the collection is dark colored. When the butterfly rests, the fore wings don’t overlap the posterior ones.

There are species with very efficient ocelli even from the diurnal butterflies group. Such an example is Caligo memnon which is also called “The Giant Owl Butterfly”. On the ventral part of the posterior wings, it has two huge eyes, acknowledging the fact that the hinder ones are bigger and provided with two rings (the external one (black) and the internal one (yellow)), with the middle zone being painted black. On the fore wings, there can be seen two little eyes. The color of their wings is maroon, so they can imitate the tree bark when resting [19].

Results and discussions

Thirty one species of butterflies have been studied, from which 25 are diurnal species and 6 are nocturnal species.

The way in which the scales are situated on the wings (which is the thing that makes the flight possible) was studied with a stereomicroscope provided with a video camera, existent in the biology laboratory. The use of rhis microscope, which captured the tissues of the butterflies, helped discovering other details about the structure of the wings such as: the existence of the hairs, the form of the ribs - which are responsible for the strength and the flexibility of the wings.

The study of the butterfly collection and the analysis of the photographs, provided for each of the 31 species, the role played by the color of the wings.

After the study of a total of 25 species of diurnal butterflies, the following statements were made (the collected data is displayed in cyclograms and percentages and emphasizes comparatively the morphology, shape and color of the wings):

— 13 species present sexual dimorphism, the color of the male being more intense than the one of the female. It have been observed that the color and the shape of the wings differ depending on sex. The females from some species show a variability in what the shape and the color of the wings are concerned (the presence of polymorphism either among the subjects of the same population). (Cyclogram 1)

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