Edith’s checkerspot butterflies are found throughout western North America, but they don’t all look or act the same. Dozens of habitat-specific forms or ecotypes of the species have been documented, and each is so strongly adapted to its local environment that it can differ markedly from populations a mere 20 kilometers away.
Indeed, decades of laboratory and field experiments on the species’ adaptability—including work that garnered Stanford population biologist Paul Ehrlich the coveted Crafoord Prize—indicate that this little lepidopteran can make major ecological shifts, such as switching host plant species, remarkably quickly. This makes them excellent models for studying the consequences of anthropogenic activity, but a lack of genomic resources has made such work difficult. A high-quality genome for the species, recently assembled and published July 25 in Genome Biology and Evolution, will likely change that.
To construct the butterfly’s 0.6 Gb genome, the team employed Oxford Nanopore long-read sequencing ...
