Café Scientifique: "Flying Colors: Innovation and Evolution in Butterfly Coloration"

Carnegie Science Center's Podcast

*Note: Due to a microphone malfunction, the first few minutes of the lecture were lost. We apologize for the inconveniance and less than ideal quality of what was able to be recorded. Butterfly colors have fascinated biologists and amateurs alike for thousands of years, but it’s only been in the past several decades that researchers have begun to understand many aspects of the function and evolution of these eye-catching traits. Drawing from his own research, Dr. Morehouse will talk about new developments in our understanding of how butterflies produce their colors, what they use them for and why some butterflies are colorful and others are not. Dr. Morehouse has been chasing colorful insects since the age of 3, but he began his formal training as a biologist at Cornell University, graduating with Distinction in Research in 2000. After graduation, he worked as a commercial salmon fisherman off of the coast of Kodiak Island, a farmhand on Vancouver Island, and the general manager and sommelier of a French restaurant in New York, before returning to biology as a doctoral student at Arizona State University. He received his Ph.D. in 2009 studying sexual selection, coloration and resource dynamics in the Cabbage White butterfly under the direction of Dr. Ron Rutowski. He then joined the lab of Dr. Jerome Casas at the Université de Tours, France as a European Union Marie Curie Fellow, where he studied the evolution and development of seasonal wing coloration in the European Map Butterfly from 2009-2011. He is now an Assistant Professor in the Department of Biological Sciences at the University of Pittsburgh, where his lab studies the use of color in the animal kingdom, focused predominantly on color vision and color signaling in butterflies and jumping spiders. Recorded at the Carnegie Science Center, Pittsburgh, PA. Monday, May 6th, 2013.