The upper side of the painted lady butterfly’s wings is mainly orange-brown with black and white spots, while the tips of the front wings are black with white dots. The underside of the rear wings has a finer, brown-gray marbled pattern with four to five small eye spots, which serve as camouflage, while the upper side with its bright colors may deter enemies.
In the 1920s, biologists proposed that butterfly wing pattern diversity evolved as variations of a ground plan of pattern elements that vary in color, shape, and position between different species. New research supports the idea that an ancient color pattern ground plan is already encoded in the genome and that non-coding regulatory DNA works like switches to turn up some patterns and turn down others.