Author: Kossivi Maglo
Mentor: Johannes Familton
Institution: BMCC
Abstract: Fractal dimension and the Gender of Monarch Butterflies
Look at the butterfly wings, you can see a repeated pattern. If we took out a ruler and measured each pattern, we would get a different measurement for each section. Fractals are complex, and they are not perfect squares, circles, or triangles.
Dr. Familton raised monarch butterflies from eggs he found this past summer near BMCC. We have been comparing the fractal dimension of the male and female monarchs he raised. He took about 15 – 50 pictures of each of the 31 butterflies he raised using an iPad pro.
The difference between male and female wing patterns is subtle. We want to see if there is any significant statistical difference between the sexes and their wing patterns. We chose about 5 pictures from each set of pictures to analyze.
We are using a MatLab fractal dimension program to analyze the pictures, but we cannot just put the pictures in the program as they are. We have to turn the pictures into line drawings. In order to do this we have to do image processing using an online program called Free Picture Stencil Maker and Photoshop to clean up the image. We separate the male and female butterfly pictures and run them through MatLab, and then do a statistical analysis of the male and female monarchs.
