FOLLOWING THE LEADER: HOW HELICONIUS ETHILLA BUTTERFLIES EXCHANGE INFORMATION ON RESOURCE LOCATIONS

Neotropical forest-dwelling Heliconius butterflies exhibit different types of social behavior such as nocturnal communal roosting--aggregations at specific locations to spend the night together (Benson 1971; Turner 1971a, 1975; Young & Thomason 1975; Young & Carolan 1976; Waller & Gilbert 1982; Mallet 1986) and cooperative egg laying, where females of some species are believed to cooperate in jointly laying batches of eggs (Turner 1971b; Mallet & Jackson 1980; Reed 2003; but see Turner 1981). In addition, the ability of Heliconius to learn and incorporate resource locations into daily routes and broadly overlapping generations (Ehrlich & Gilbert 1973) has led some authors to propose that younger butterflies may learn resource locations by following more experienced ones (Gilbert 1975; Brown 1981; Turner 1981). However, evidence for the education of younger butterflies remains scarce.