A phylogenetic analysis of the influence of morphology on mobility in European butterflies. Supplementary Files

1. Patterns and processes of mobility in insects has been of great interest to the scientific community, not only for the complex interactions that underpin these movements, but also the morphological and physiological adaptations that mobile species have developed for flight.2. Butterflies are a model taxon for investigating these questions, as the group includes some of the most iconic and well-studied species showing a wide variety of movement patterns from long-range migrants to highly sedentary species.3. Migratory species have been found to have bigger wings, and typically larger body size, than related non-migrants to sustain these strenuous flights. However, it remains to be determined how other mobile, but non-migratory, species might have evolved adaptations to flight.4. The goal of this study is to address the question of how the morphology (size and shape of wings and body) differs between migratory, highly mobile, and sedentary butterfly species. For this we performed a phylogenetic analysis on body measurements of 78 species of European butterflies that have different mobility requirements.5. We found that sedentary species have the smallest bodies, in general, and migratory ones the largest. Highly mobile species show a mixed morphology between these other two.6. We also found that phylogeny plays a key role in the differences in morphology, with closely-related species tending to have similar morphologies. However, mobility behaviours revealed to have a clear phylogenetic effect too, meaning that mobile species’ morphology might look different to other sister species as a form of adaptation to this behaviour.