Facts about Butterflies
Skippers differ in several important ways from the remaining butterflies.
Butterflies have fine scales on their wings that look like a fine powder.
Aesthetically, human fascination with butterflies has led to their being featured in paintings, poetry, and books, and as symbols used for jewelry, wallpaper, and so forth.
Some butterflies, such as the Monarch butterfly, are migratory.
The life cycle of butterflies also has been depicted as an apt metaphor for eternal life, as the "earth-bound" caterpillar transforms into the ethereal butterfly.
Much of the theory on aposematism and mimicry arose from nineteenth-century studies by lepidopterists studying butterflies in the New World and the Orient.
Butterflies add important economic, ecological, and aesthetic values.
People who study or collect butterflies (or the closely related moths) are called lepidopterists.
Several species of butterflies need more sodium than provided by the nectar they drink from flowers.
Butterflies have been used as model organisms for a variety of fields of study, spanning ecology, evolutionary biology, and conservation biology (Boggs et al.
Some modern taxonomists place them all in superfamily Papilionoidea, distinguishing the skippers from the other butterflies at the series level only.
Butterflies belong to Lepidoptera or scaly-winged insects (lepidos = scales and pteron = wings in Greek).
Some butterflies are now considered endangered species, and the Xerces blue butterfly is the first known butterfly to become extinct in North America.
The data suggested that the moths of Hedyloidea are indeed more closely related to the butterflies than to other moths.
Some butterflies, such as the Monarch butterfly, are migratory.
Butterflies, on the other hand, are a natural group, in that they are all considered to have descended from a single common ancestor, but they do not have a formal taxonomic rank.
The Old English word for butterfly was buttorfleoge apparently because butterflies were thought to steal milk.
Butterflies make the world a little more colorful. ... However, butterflies do more than just paint a pretty picture. They help flowers pollinate, eat plenty of weedy plants and provide a food source for other animals. In addition, their presence or absence can tell us a lot about the local environment.Apr 24, 2017
Adult butterflies do not urinate or defecate (or "go to the bathroom"). The larval life stage - the caterpillar - does all of the eating, and caterpillars almost continually defecate. Interestingly, when there enough caterpillars eating in the same place, their defecation is audible. That is, you can hear the poop!
Butterflies don't bite because they can't. Caterpillars munch on leaves and eat voraciously with their chewing mouthparts, and some of them do bite if they feel threatened. But once they become butterflies, they only have a long, curled proboscis, which is like a soft drinking straw—their jaws are gone.
When butterflies cannot keep their temperatures at activity levels, when it's cloudy, or at night they become quiescent. This quiescence, or resting, is not equivalent to human sleep. Butterflies always have their eyes open, since they do not have eyelids and they probably do not dream.
In the same way, moths are active at night and during the day moths hide and rest. Animals that sleep during the night, like most butterflies, are diurnal. Animals that sleep during the day, like most moths, are nocturnal. ... Aren't moths the ones that fly at night and butterflies the ones that sleep at night?"Jan 6, 2017
By marking butterflies then recapturing or sighting them later, scientists gain information on how long butterflies can live. An average butterfly species has an adult life span of two weeks or less. For example one butterfly studied in Costa Rica had a life expectancy of about two days, and live ten days at the most.