(From Science Daily) Breaking up may actually not be hard to do, say scientists who’ve found a population of tropical butterflies that may be on its way to a split into two distinct species. The cause of this particular break-up? A shift in wing color and mate preference.

In a paper published this week in the journal Science, the researchers describe the relationship between diverging color patterns in Heliconius butterflies and the long-term divergence of populations into new and distinct species.

“Our paper provides a unique glimpse into the earliest stage of ecological speciation, where natural selection to fit the environment causes the same trait in the same population to be pushed in two different directions,” says Marcus Kronforst, a Bauer Fellow in the Center for Systems Biology at Harvard University who received his doctor’s degree at The University of Texas at Austin. “If this trait is also involved in reproduction, this process can have a side effect of causing the divergent subpopulations to no longer interbreed. This appears to be the process that is just beginning among Heliconius butterflies in Ecuador.”

Heliconius butterflies display incredible color pattern variation across Central and South America, with closely related species usually sporting different colors. In Costa Rica, for example, the two most closely related species differ in color: One species is white and the other is yellow. In addition, both species display a marked preference to mate with butter-flies of the same color.

Read more here: Caught In the Act: Butterfly Mate Preference Shows How One Species Can Become Two