Fig. 3: Metabarcoding of the pollen carried by the butterflies indicates the African origin of the transatlantic trip.
From: A trans-oceanic flight of over 4,200 km by painted lady butterflies
Classification of the obtained ITS2 metabarcoding sequences processed using a denoising pipeline (see Methods), and blasted on curated databases from A PLANiTS83 and B Sickel et al.82 using the SINTAX classifier. In addition to plants present in French Guiana or widely distributed (green bars), two Sahelian endemic plants (yellow bars) were found among the pollen recovered from the bodies of the painted lady butterflies in South America: Guiera senegalensis and Ziziphus spina-christi, the former being especially common. Source Data is available in Supplementary Table S3.
