RESEARCH ARTICLE Resource grain scales mobility and adult morphology in butterflies Camille Turlure Æ Nicolas Schtickzelle Æ Michel Baguette Received: 13 March 2009 / Accepted: 17 August 2009 / Published online: 28 August 2009 Ó Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2009 Abstract Relations between species mobility and life history traits and/or landscape and habitat features are of broad interest to ecologists and conservation biologists. Here we investigated the reliability of the relations between mobility and (1) resource grain and (2) morphological traits in butterflies. Results were used to assess the biological realism of morphological traits associated with flight as mobility proxies. We then investigated how biological, environmental and landscape variables affected these mobility proxies. We used a multi-species approach on two different sites. Morphological traits were measured on ca. 20 individuals per site, species and sex. Resource distri- bution was carefully monitored by investigating the spatial distribution and overlap of larval and adult feeding resources, together representing the resource grain. The spatial extent of individual station keeping movements was estimated from distances recorded between successive recaptures of individuals from mark-release-recapture experiments. Morphological traits seemed reliable proxies of mobility, as both variables were strongly correlated. Morphological variations were related to flight type and spatial dimension of nectar resource. The most striking point was the clear relation between the index of relative investment in mobility versus fecundity in females with the spatial dimension of adult feeding resource. Given the generally accepted relation between abdo- men volume and female fecundity, this suggests that females might invest more in fecundity when nectar resources are widespread. Finally, we did not detected effects of landscape structure on mobility, which indicates that functional grain of resources is more likely to influence mobility and evolution of morphol- ogy in butterflies than landscape connectivity. Keywords Belgian peat bogs  Boloria aquilonaris  Clossiana selene  Functional resource grain  Lepidoptera  Life history traits  Lycaena hippothoe  Oogenesis flight syndrome  Proclossiana eunomia Introduction How individuals map onto suitable resources has always been a central issue in ecology, but this topic has become of particular importance in the current era of global change when accurate predictions of C. Turlure (&)  N. Schtickzelle Biodiversity Research Centre, Universite ´ catholique de Louvain, Place Croix du Sud, 4, 1348 Louvain-la-Neuve, Belgium e-mail: turlure_camille@hotmail.com; camille.turlure@uclouvain.be Present Address: C. Turlure  M. Baguette Muse ´um National d’Histoire Naturelle (MNHN), De ´partement Ecologie et Gestion de la Biodiversite ´, CNRS UMR MNHN 7179 MAOAC, Avenue du Petit Cha ˆteau, 1, 91800 Brunoy, France 123 Landscape Ecol (2010) 25:95–108 DOI 10.1007/s10980-009-9403-3