By Jake Buehler
On some butterfly wings, “tails” may be more than just elegant adornments. They’re survival tools too, a study suggests.
The tails seem to attract the attention of attacking birds, keeping them away from a butterfly’s more vital body parts, researchers report May 25 in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B. The finding could help explain why wing tails have independently evolved multiple times across different moth and butterfly groups.
Evolutionary biologist Ariane Chotard of the National Museum of Natural History in Paris studies the wings of swallowtail butterflies, which make up the hundreds of species in the family Papilionidae. “A lot of these butterflies display tails,” Chotard says. “And we don’t really know why.”