Physiological Evidence for Color Receptors in the Eye of a Butterfly1

Abstract

Although there is behavioral evidence for color vision in several species of Lepidoptera (Knoll 1925; Use 1928, 1937; Schlegtendal 1934; Schremmer 1941; Crane 1955; Use and Vaidya 1956; Mazokhin-Porshnyakov 1969), physiological analysis of the underlying mechanisms has hardly begun. Spectral sensitivity functions indicating more than 1 kind of receptor in the compound eye havebeen reported for 2 species of moth (Hasselmann 1962, Boethius et al. 1968) and a single species of butterfly (Swihart 1963, 1965).