A look into the ecology and evolution of butterflies in the last thesis inspired by Professor Ramon Margalef
The ecology and evolution of butterflies is the focus of the last doctoral thesis carried out at the UB under the supervision of Professor Ramon Margalef (1919-2004), the first professor of Ecology in Spain. The study, carried out by Albert Masó at the Faculty of Biology last January, contributed to check Professor Margalefʼs hypotheses on the influence of plants on butterflies and, in particular, on the cell duplication as a macroevolutionary process to generate new species.
The ecology and evolution of butterflies is the focus of the last doctoral thesis carried out at the UB under the supervision of Professor Ramon Margalef (1919-2004), the first professor of Ecology in Spain. The study, carried out by Albert Masó at the Faculty of Biology last January, contributed to check Professor Margalefʼs hypotheses on the influence of plants on butterflies and, in particular, on the cell duplication as a macroevolutionary process to generate new species.
This thesis -the last doctoral study directly inspired by Ramon Margalef- is divided into two parts. In the first one, the author unveils a research in the geographical area of Montseny Massif to check whether plants determine the features of the butterfly community, and to do research on some biological features in some species. The study served to rule out the fact that these Lepidoptera show a determining dependence on plants and, also, whether the specific composition of plants has a predictive role regarding the butterfly community. Moreover, it also detected a big coincidence between voltinism -amount of generations of an organism appearing over a year- and the wintering phase of those species that are genetically closer.
In the second part, Albert Masó confirms another of Margalefʼs hypotheses, that shich states the phenomenon of cell duplication in butterfly wings as a potential evolutionary mechanism and biological diversification. The obtained results, resulting from a rigorous research in collections of the main natural history museums, show a clear link between the size of the wings and the number of scales. As a result, these duplications would be a discontinuous evolutionary mechanism, an idea Margalef always liked and which is now reinforced by these results.
Over the course of this study, the supervision task which began Margalef, was continued by the professors Javier Romero -Margalef disciple and member of the Faculty of Biology and the Biodiversity Research Institute of the UB (IRBio)- and Joaquim Baixeras, member of the Cavanilles Institute of Biodiversity and Evolutionary Biology of the University of Valencia.
Professor Ramon Margalef is considered to be one of the fathers of modern biology and one of the pillars of 20th century ecology. Author of model studies, he received an international recognition with many prestigious awards such as the Huntsman Award for Biological Oceanography, from the Bedford Institute of Oceanography (Canada); the Naumann-Thuenemann Medal, from the International Society of Limnology, and the Alexander von Humboldt Award, from the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation (Germany). Margalef is one of the most mentioned scientists in the area of ecology, and left a huge legacy that ranges from scientific articles, books, communications in conferences to contributions in dissemination journals, where he outstands a set of renewing ideas and a way of thinking about nature which had an impact and guided many studies of many ecologists.