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  3. A butterfly’s wings can have many jobs besides keeping the insect aloft. They may be called on to attract mates, to warn potenti

A butterfly’s wings can have many jobs besides keeping the insect aloft. They may be called on to attract mates, to warn potenti

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问题     A butterfly’s wings can have many jobs besides keeping the insect aloft. They may be called on to attract mates, to warn potential predators to stay away, to mimic other animals or even to provide camouflage. All of these roles, though, depend on their colouration— which is unchanging. This plays into the idea that butterfly wings are dead tissue, like a bird’s feathers or a mammal’s hair. In fact, that is not true.
    Nanfang Yu, a physicist at Columbia University, in New York, has been looking into the matter. One of his interests is the optical properties of biological materials. That has led him to study butterfly wings in more detail. And, in collaboration with Naomi Pierce, a butterfly specialist at Harvard University, he has now shown, in a paper published this week in Nature Communications, that butterfly wings are, indeed, very much alive.
    Initially, Dr Yu and Dr Pierce wanted to know how the insects keep their body temperatures up without their wings overheating. Unlike birds and mammals, butterflies do not generate enough internal heat to run their metabolisms at full pelt. Instead, they rely on outside heat sources—usually the sun—to bring their bodies up to speed. But their wings, being thin protein membranes, have a limited thermal capacity. Those wings can therefore overheat quickly if the insects bask too long in sunlight, or, conversely, can cool down too rapidly if they are flying through cold air.
    In their experiments, the two researchers used a laser to heat up spots on the wings of dozens of butterfly species. When the temperature of the area under the laser reached 40°C or so, the insects responded within seconds by doing things that stopped their wings heating up further. These actions included a butterfly turning around to minimise its profile to the laser, flapping its wings or simply walking away.
    Butterflies engaged in all of these heat-minimising activities even when the researchers blindfolded them. That suggested the relevant sensors were on the wings themselves. Dr Yu and Dr Pierce therefore searched those wings for likely looking sensory cells. They found some, in the form of neurons that resembled heat detectors known from other insects. They speculate that these are there to detect deformation of the wing—information an insect could use to control its flight pattern.
    The third discovery Dr Yu and Dr Pierce made to contradict the "dead wing" hypothesis was that some butterfly wings have a heartbeat. Anyone who has looked closely at a butterfly will know that its wings have veins. These carry a bloodlike fluid called haemolymph. For a long time, entomologists thought the only role of the veins was, by being pumped full of haemolymph, to inflate the wings to full stretch after a butterfly emerged from its chrysalis. Dr Yu and Dr Pierce have now found that in male hairstreaks the haemolymph shows a pulse of several dozen beats per minute.
The initial purpose of Dr Yu and Dr Pierce’s research on butterfly wings is_____
选项 A、to prove butterfly wings are versatile living organs
B、to look into butterflies’ body temperature control
C、to analysis the process of butterflies’ metabolisms
D、to ignite butterfly wings to find heat detectors
答案B
解析 根据题干关键词initial purpose和Dr Yu and Dr Pierce可定位到第三段第一句。该句指出Initially，Dr Yu and Dr Pierce wanted to know how the insects keep their body temperatures up without their wings overheating．(起初，虞博士和皮尔斯博士想知道这些昆虫是如何在不使翅膀过热的情况下保持体温的)，由此可知，虞博士和皮尔斯博士最初只是想对蝴蝶的体温控制进行研究，故选项[B] to look into butterflies’ body temperature control“研究蝴蝶的体温控制”为正确答案。
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