The Butterflies That Hear With the Veins in Their Wings - The Atlantic 18.10.

18, 00'52

SC IEN C E

The Butterflies That Hear With

Their Wings
A petite group called the
satyrines uses swollen veins to
channel sound into tiny ears.
ED YONG 7:00 AM ET

A common wood-nymph butterfly (STEVEN R

SMITH / SHUTTERSTOCK)

When Jayne Yack speaks,

she knows that her
butterflies can hear her.
They’re listening with their
wings.

Yack, a professor at
Carleton University,
studies a group of
butterflies called
nymphalids, which include

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well-known species like

monarchs, morphos,
emperors, and admirals.
Many members of this
group have ears at the base
of their wings. If one lifted
its top pair of wings in the
air, “the ear would be in
what you think of as the
armpit,” Yack says.

The ears consist of

membranes that are
stretched taut over oval
holes, and that vibrate
when incoming sounds hit
them. Those vibrations
trigger electrical signals in
the insects’ nerves, which
Yack can record. In this
way, she has shown that the
ears are especially sensitive
to low frequencies, like
those found in human
speech. “When we’re
recording from a butterfly
and we’re talking, its nerves
are just firing like crazy,”
she says. “Moths don’t hear
us; they’re tuned to high

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frequencies. But butterflies

can.”

Over the years, Yack

noticed that one group of
nymphalids—the satyrines,
or browns—has weird veins
on the top pair of wings.
Veins are common to all
butterfly wings; they’re air-
filled tubes that don’t carry
blood, but instead provide
structural support. They’re
usually very thin, but the
satyrines have one on each
wing that’s bizarrely
bloated, like a single piece
of penne on a plate of
spaghetti. Scientists have
described these inflated
veins before, but Yack
noted that they lie very
close to the satyrines’ ears.
Maybe, she suspected, they
help the insects hear.

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THE SWOLLEN VEIN, CONNECTED

TO THE EAR ON THE LEFT. CREDIT:
YACK LAB.

To test that idea, she sent

specimens of the common
wood nymph to Natasha
Mhatre at the University of
Toronto, who studies
acoustic communication in
insects. She played noises
at the butterflies’ ears while
shining lasers on them. By
analyzing the reflected
laser light, she could work
out how much the ears
move in response to
different sounds. “We can
get a pretty good
appreciation of what the
butterfly is hearing,” Yack
says.

These experiments
revealed that the veins are,
in effect, part of the ears.
When Mhatre cut them
open, the ears became less
sensitive in general, and to
low-pitched sounds in

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particular. In the same way

that our fleshy outer ears
gather sounds and focus
them toward our eardrums,
the common wood nymph’s
bloated veins focus sounds
onto their ears.

That’s useful because these

butterflies are very small—
just a couple of inches from
wing tip to wing tip. Small
membranes aren’t very
good at detecting low-
pitched sounds, or at
working out where those
sounds are coming from.
The veins seemingly
compensate for this
problem. “They’re hearing
aids for small butterflies,”
Yack says.

This is a new means of

hearing that had never
been described before, says
Fernando Montealegre-Z of
the University of Lincoln: “I
remember that during my
entomology training, back
in the ’90s, we were told
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that satyrine butterflies

could be identified by the
swollen vein. We didn’t
know why this vein was
swollen, and I would have
loved to have heard an
explanation.”

Insects have really gone to

town on the evolution of
interesting ears. There are
species with ears on their
torsos, antennae, wings,
knees, and legs. And in
most cases, scientists know
very little about how these
organs work.

[ Read: This common

butterfly has an
extraordinary sex life. ]

For example, why would

butterflies need to hear low
frequencies in the first
place? Most butterflies are
silent, so they’re certainly
not listening to one
another. “We don’t really
have answers,” Yack says,
“but the most convincing

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hypothesis is that they’re

listening to the incidental
noises that predators
make.” They could be
listening for flapping wings,
or feet stepping on
branches, or feathers
rustling through grass. It’s
perhaps telling, Yack says,
that butterflies are sensitive
to the same low pitches as
rabbits, lizards, and other
small prey animals.

But satyrine hearing is

unusual in one crucial way.
Across the animal
kingdom, most ears are
tuned to particular
frequencies, while satyrine
ears react similarly to
sounds across a very wide
range of low pitches. “It’s
very rare that you see a
response that flat,” Mhatre
says. “This would make a
really good microphone.”

The ideal microphone

accurately represents the
sounds around it, without
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preferentially amplifying
certain pitches over others.
That flatness is very hard to
achieve—and yet the
satyrines have done it.
Mhatre thinks their secret
lies within their swollen
veins. These structures
aren’t completely hollow.
They contains lots of very
thin membranes that are
arranged like honeycombs,
or “like lots of soap bubbles
stuck together,” Mhatre
says. Perhaps these
membranes help flatten the
sounds that are amplified
by the veins.

As far as anyone knows,

these special hearing
abilities are reserved for the
satyrines’ swollen wing
veins, but with such a wide
variety of insect ears, that
might not be true. Adriana
Briscoe, who studies
butterfly vision at the
University of California at
Irvine, is excited about the

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possibility. “This discovery

makes me want to run back
to my lab and start rifling
through my butterfly
collection in search of
hearing organs, to figure
out how widespread they
are,” she says.

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