Akito Y. Kawahara

Aug 8, 2023 | washingtonpost.com | Akito Y. Kawahara

A painted lichen moth spreads its technicolor wings. (Carla Rhodes)By Akito Kawahara and Photos by Carla RhodesAugust 8, 2023 at 6:30 a.m. EDTAkito Kawahara is director and curator of Lepidoptera at the Florida Museum of Natural History. Carla Rhodes is a conservation photographer based in Woodstock, N.Y.Think of a monarch butterfly flying near flowers in your backyard on a summer day. Now think of a moth circling a lamp. Which caught your attention?

Jun 2, 2023 | southdadenewsleader.com | Akito Y. Kawahara |Pamela S Soltis

About 100 million years ago, a group of trendsetting moths started flying during the day rather than at night, taking advantage of nectar-rich flowers that had co-evolved with bees. This single event led to the evolution of all butterflies. Scientists have known the precise timing of this event since 2019, when a large-scale analysis of DNA discounted the reigning hypothesis that pressure from bats prompted the evolution of butterflies after the extinction of dinosaurs.

May 15, 2023 | nature.com | Akito Y. Kawahara |David Plotkin |Fabien L. Condamine |Mariana P. Braga |Paul Frandsen |Hannah L. Owens | +34 more

AbstractButterflies are a diverse and charismatic insect group that are thought to have evolved with plants and dispersed throughout the world in response to key geological events. However, these hypotheses have not been extensively tested because a comprehensive phylogenetic framework and datasets for butterfly larval hosts and global distributions are lacking.