A butterfly fluttering around flowers in a garden is one of their most glorified representations. Kids often learn to draw them in their early years. The butterfly shape has been a popular choice of tattoos among females for decades. They often come out just before spring or early summer to flap their wings and shuttle from one flower to another. Besides their wings laden with colorful patterns, butterflies are probably the only insects widely celebrated for their beauty.
Watching a butterfly is mesmerizing, and you can find an antennae on its head if you observe closely. Its thorax or mid-section connects six legs and four wings – two large and two small. However, you may assume it has only two wings tied together. When not flying, the butterfly folds the pair of wings on its back. The rear part of a butterfly is its abdomen, where its digestive system processes food and waste. Unlike humans and other creatures, butterflies don’t breath from their face or mouth area. Their abdomen has tiny holes around them to help them breathe.
After birth, the worm-like larva of a butterfly eats all kinds of plant juices to build up their tissues for healthy growth. While growing up, their skins tend to shed multiple times. And each time, their body appearance and color might change. When female butterflies emerge, they tend to look for mates quickly and daily. However, the male counterparts may often avoid mating for up to a week.
Butterflies don’t follow a specific path, unlike many creatures and insects that can fly. Another reason is that butterflies have distinct eyesight—they are near-sighted, and distant objects appear blurry. Besides that, their faces have multiple lenses that can only see the ultraviolet colors of the flowers. While they can easily fly through obstacles, they may confused in areas with different colored flowers appearing together.
These majestic insects flutter around randomly, mostly because they want to save themselves from birds. Some even develop patterns on their wings to blend with their vegetation and camouflage themselves from potential attackers. Many predators mistake butterflies for a quick snack, but that backfires quickly. The butterflies with bright-colored wings often turn out to be toxic as some of them suck on poisonous milkweeds.
Each butterfly has thousands of tiny scales on its wings, and you can’t spot them easily. Also, the colors on their wings are typically in two forms – structural and pigmented. When a butterfly flies, the reflection of different colors from the scales. Its wings are made from a protein that also protects the outer layer of the butterfly’s body. Those wing muscles are so strong that they allow butterflies to fly at the speed of 20 miles per hour.
You can view the beautiful wings when a butterfly is in its prime. But as they age, the scales on their wings fall off to reveal a transparent membrane.
The butterflies can’t regulate their body temperature since they are cold-blooded insects. That’s why you won’t find them in cooler areas. That’s because a butterfly won’t be able to move or eat in lower temperatures. So whenever the temperature drops, they often migrate to a more warmer or tropical area. Ultimately, they’re terrestrial insects – mainly living on land, but that could be tropical rainforests or mountains above sea level.
While butterflies, like other beings, have a mouth, their taste buds are actually in their feet. That’s how they find food to eat, and you may find a butterfly repeatedly jumping and landing on the same leaf, flower petal, or fruit. But that’s only to make the plant release the juices the butterfly can taste with its feet. When it comes to eating, they’re mainly on a liquid diet. The mature butterflies drink only nectar through their tube-like tongue, which acts like a straw. Otherwise, its tongue rolls up under the chin, and their mouths cannot bite or chew anything.
You may have spotted butterflies fluttering or sitting near puddles, but they do that to extract necessary minerals and nutrients.
Most pretty butterflies have a short life span—two to four weeks. The tiny blue butterflies manage to live a few days. Only the monarch butterflies can live up to nine months.