Top 25 Amazing Facts About Butterflies | Amazing Facts 4U
- There are about 24,000 species of butterflies. Amazingly the moths are even more numerous, about 140,000 species.
- The butterfly was originally called Flutterby.
- A butterfly’s lifecycle is made up of four parts, egg, larva (caterpillars), pupa (chrysalis), and adult.
- An amazing fact is during the time from hatching to pupation, a caterpillar increases its body size an astonishing 30,000 times or more.
- Caterpillars do not have bones but have amazing 1,000 muscles with which they can move at a very quick pace.
- Caterpillars keep on eating and growing. It has to shed its skin 5 times as it outgrows before it becomes a pupa.
- An adult butterfly will eventually emerge from the chrysalis where it will wait a few hours for its wings to fill with blood and dry, before flying for the first time.
- Butterflies range in size from a tiny 1/8 inch. The Queen Alexandra butterflies from the island of Papua New Guinea is the largest butterfly having a wingspan of about 11 Inches!
- Butterflies and moths can be separately identified. Butterflies have a thickened club or hook on the tip of the antenna, never ‘feathery’ while moths have simple thread-like or ‘feathery’ antenna without a club. Moths have their wings are linked together with a bristle-like structure called a frenulum while butterflies have no such linkage. Butterflies hold wings together above the body when resting while moths hold wings flat when resting. Butterflies fly during the day while moths usually Fly at night.
- Butterflies have two compound eyes consisting of thousands of lenses, yet they can amazingly see only three colors red, green, and yellow.
- Butterflies can’t hear, but they can feel vibrations. Butterflies also don’t have lungs breathing through openings on their abdomen called ‘spiracles’.
- The amazing fact is many butterflies can taste with their hind feet to find out whether the leaf they sit on is good to lay eggs on to be their caterpillars’ food or not.
- A butterfly wing is transparent being formed by layers of chitin, the protein that makes up an insect’s exoskeleton. These layers are so thin you can see right through them. Amazingly what we see as color isn’t pigment but light reflected off the scales on their wings.
- A butterfly’s mouth is a long tube, through which it sucks the sweet nectar from flowers. When the butterfly does not want to eat, it amazingly rolls the tube up! Adult butterflies can only feed on liquids. Their mouthparts are modified to enable them to drink, but they can’t chew solids.
- They don’t poop! A butterfly’s diet is made up only of liquids. Its body uses almost all of the liquids that it drinks.
- The Morgan’s Sphinx Moth from Madagascar has a proboscis (tube mouth) that is amazing 12 to 14 inches long to get the nectar from the bottom of a 12-inch deep orchid.
- The amazing fact is some moths never eat anything as adults because they don’t have mouths. They must live on the energy they stored as caterpillars.
- Some butterflies can fly 50km/h or faster. Slow flying butterflies fly about 10km/h.
- Butterflies are cold-blooded insects and need the warmth of the sun to enable them to fly. For a butterfly to fly it must have a body temperature of no less than 86 degrees Fahrenheit or 30 degrees celsius. If the temperature is less, they are rendered immobile.
- Butterflies usually live just 2-4 weeks.
- Monarch butterflies journey from the Great Lakes to the Gulf of Mexico, a distance of about 2,000 miles. Females will lay eggs and a new generation of monarchs will travel back in the spring completing the cycle. In fact, monarchs can fly 1000 km without stopping. It is the only butterfly species to migrate such a vast distance.
- The amazing fact is there is a butterfly in Africa with enough poison in its body to kill six cats.
- There’s a group of butterflies called night butterflies that have ears on their wings to avoid being picked off and eaten by bats.
- Butterfly wings are not solely for flight; they also act amazingly as miniature solar panels.
- Butterflies in your stomach are caused by a lack of blood!
A lovely insight. Find more at www.eyeopenerquotes.com
