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It's easy to tell apart the sexes of pupae of most Leps with a bit of
practice via morphology and a hand lens, so you don't need genetics or to
sample destructively. <br><br>
For Heliconius pupae, there's a nice diagram showing sexual differences
of ?Heliconius erato in one of Jocelyn Crane's papers -- would anyone
like to put it on the web? I haven't got Crane's papers here, but I think
it's probably in this one:<br><br>
Beebe, W., J. Crane, and H. Fleming. 1960. A comparison of eggs, larvae
and pupae in fourteen species of Heliconiine butterflies from Trinidad,
W.I. Zoologica, New York 45:111-153.<br><br>
I understand it's also possible to tell apart larvae of some Lepidoptera,
but I don't think anyone has checked carefully in Heliconius. In small
transparent-cuticled leps like tortricids it's possible to see the dark
coloured testes through the cuticle in quite young larvae. Igor
Emelianov and I used this in Zeiraphera diniana. (Testes are also dark in
Heliconius adults -- not yellow or white as suggested by Alexie for I
presume other taxa).<br><br>
Ilik Saccheri claims (pers. comm.) that you can take small amounts of
haemolymph from Biston pupae without killing them.<br><br>
Good luck, Jim<br><br>
<br>
<blockquote type=cite class=cite cite="">On Wed, 2010-04-14 at 11:57
+0100, Jamie Walters wrote: <br>
<blockquote type=cite class=cite cite=""><pre>Hello all,
I'm curious to know if anyone has had any success (or informative
failures...?) with developing W-linked markers for Heliconius (or
any
butterfly that would be near enough to be useful).
Or, alternatively, if anyone has any particularly clever ideas for
mining the existing genome data for candidate regions I'd be keen
to
hear them.
I'm simply interested in being able to sex juveniles and pupae.
Thanks very much,
Jamie
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<font face="Arial, Helvetica">________________________________<br><br>
James Mallet<br>
UCL<br>
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www.ucl.ac.uk/taxome/jim<br><br>
</a>Helen Putnam Fellow 2009-2010<br>
Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study<br>
Harvard University<br>
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