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The answer to the question “Do butterflies drink blood?” is yes.” Now they don’t attack people or animals to drink their blood like mosquitoes or… horseflies to do. For starters, butterflies don’t have those piercing mouthparts that can break the skin and blood capillaries. However, if blood is offered to a butterfly, will sip it. It’s not all that scary. The butterfly only needs the minerals that are found in the blood. They drink blood in the same way as urine, tears, sweat, fluid from stool, and the fluid that seeps from rotting fruit and rotting corpses. Indeed, there are many surprising facts about butterflies! Here are a few:
1. Zebra Longwings Eat Pollen
Many people believe that everything eat butterflies pollen and sipping nectar. This is not true. As far as biologists know, zebra long-winged butterfly is one of the few butterflies that actually eat pollen. It inserts its trunk into the flower and moves it around to make sure the pollen sticks to it. The saliva of the butterfly ensures that the pollen is immediately digested, releasing amino acids, the building blocks of proteins. Because it can eat pollen, the longwing zebra lives longer than most other butterflies. Not only this, the pollen is converted into a type of cyanide in the body of the butterfly, making it poisonous to potential predators.
This beautiful butterfly, the state butterfly of Florida, is unmistakable for its long, oval wings, striped in black and white like a zebra’s fur. It is also found in the Caribbean and as far south as South America. They lay their eggs on passion flower plants, but also extract nectar from lantanas, verbenas and asters.
2. Butterflies are younger than moths
Lepidopterans, members of the order that contains both butterflies and moths, evolved about 200 million years ago. Butterflies probably appeared 100 million years later in the mid Cretaceous. Most butterflies belong to the papilionoidea super family. There are 20,000 to 25,000 species of butterflies in the world and even more species of moths.
3. Some Butterfly Colors Are Optical Illusions
Butterfly wings are covered with scales, from which the order takes its name. Lepis means “scale” and pteron means “wing” in ancient Greek. Some scales are colored by pigments, but some colors are created by the way the scales are arranged and how the light hits them. These colors are usually green, red and blue.
4. Some butterflies have long migrations
Butterflies like the monarch and the painted lady travels for what may be thousands of miles. They navigate by orienting themselves to the sun, and because they can see polarized light, they can travel even on cloudy days. Because butterflies do not live very long and are vulnerable, these migrations can take generations. For example, a return journey between Africa and northern Europe started by a painted lady can be completed by her great-great-great-granddaughter.
By the way, the monarch butterfly doesn’t fly all the way to Mexico to reproduce. It goes there to get away from the colder temperatures of the northern range. Butterflies cannot fly well if their body temperature is below 85 degrees Fahrenheit and cannot fly at all if the air temperature is below 55 degrees F.
To go here to learn more about the monarch butterfly.
5. The longest-lived butterfly lives about a year
Although the zebra-winged butterfly has a relatively long lifespan because it eats pollen, the sulfur moth is the longest-lived butterfly. There is a trick to sulfur’s longevity, as it takes almost two months to go from egg to egg caterpillar to a pupa and finally to an adult, and the adult spends seven months of its life in hibernation. Because its wings resemble leaves, the sulfur can cling to a tree branch during hibernation and be undetected by predators. It is found in North Africa, Asia, and Europe.
To go here to see how long butterflies live.
6. Some butterflies make noise
While most butterflies are wonderfully quiet when flying or feeding, another surprising fact about butterflies is that some do make noise. The cracker butterflies are notable in that the male makes a cracking sound when defending his territory or trying to attract a mate. The Queen Cracker is an exceptionally beautiful member of the species. The male has round, dark wings with metallic blue and he makes the unique sound by folding them together. The females are larger and have a white band on their forewing and metallic blue markings. They also make a cracking sound.
7. A Butterfly Takes a Number
The 88 butterfly has the number 88 on the underside of both its hind wings. The upper part of the wings of the butterfly is brown with a white diagonal band on the forewings, but the underside of the forewings is orange with brown and white bands and the 88 on the hindwings. This little butterfly was found in South American and Central America rainforests and has a wingspan of 1.5 to 1.75 inches.
8. Butterfly vs. Moth
Butterflies are usually identified by moths, as their antennae are slender and tufted at the ends. The antennae of most moths are hairy or resemble wires and have no buds. Moths are mostly nocturnal, while most butterflies fly during the day
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Butterflies also tend to have slimmer bodies than moths, whose bodies are usually robust and hairy. There are exceptions. The Koh-i-Noor and the moth fly at dusk, and Uraniidae moths, which look suspiciously like butterflies, fly during the day, as does the male tau keizer moth. The female tau emperor moth flies at night. The bodies of some Nymphalidae butterflies are also fluffy and fat, including ‘s bejeweled nawab Oceania and Southeast Asia and the great blue signs of Africa.
To learn more about butterflies vs. moths, read: this.
9. Taste receptors in the feet
A butterfly’s sense of taste is in its legs, not its trunk. To get the taste of the plant, the female scratches it with her feet. This is important because a female butterfly needs to taste a plant and know what it is before she lays her eggs on it. Some caterpillars feed on only one type of plant. These caterpillars include the monarch that eats milkweed and the zebra longwing that eats passionflowers. Butterflies use their antennae to smell and control the wind.
10. Most Lycaenidae Caterpillars are raised by ants
Lycaenidae Butterflies are a huge family of butterflies that consists of blues, harvesters, hairstreaks, and coppers. One of the surprising facts about these butterflies is that many of them use ants to raise their caterpillars. The large blue butterfly lays its eggs on a plant. The caterpillar feeds until it reaches a certain size and then falls to the ground where it is picked up by ants. The ants do not kill or eat the caterpillar because the caterpillar releases pheromones that mimic the pheromones of ant larvae. This makes the adult ants want to take care of the caterpillar. So they carry the caterpillar to their colony and feed it. Other caterpillars make a sound similar to one that the queen ant would make. This not only ensures that the ants take care of it, but that the care takes precedence over everything else in the colony.
A third, nastier strategy is for the caterpillar to mimic an ant larva while feeding on real ant larvae. Fortunately, sometimes the ants are on the run and kill and eat the caterpillar.
11. Butterflies don’t poop
Most butterflies drink nectar (or drink blood or sweat or urine or tears), but they don’t defecate. One reason for this is that nectar is a liquid and it is difficult to extract solid waste from it. Also, the butterfly’s digestion is so efficient that it uses everything it ingests for energy. However, it can expel some excess liquid if eaten in excess, and most of that liquid is nothing but water.
12. Butterflies are slow
There are butterflies called skippers that can fly as fast as 60 miles per hour, but most butterflies are slow fliers that don’t go much faster than 20 miles per hour. Butterfly wings also work in a figure-eight pattern, and the path of their flight is famously erratic.
13. Some butterflies have transparent wings
If a butterfly has no scales on part of its wing, that part of the wing is transparent like a rhombus. There are several types of butterflies with transparent wings. One is the big fat butterfly from Oceania and South East Asia. The forewings of the male are almost completely transparent and the hindwings have large transparent areas. Females emerge with gray scales on their wings, but they soon molt and the wings have a greasy appearance that gives the butterfly its name.
Other butterflies with transparent wings are the black-veined whites of Northern Asia, Europe and Northern Europe Africa and the Esmeralda and small thyridia of Central and South America.
Next one: What is the bite force of a crocodile?
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