Butterfly Facts
• Butterflies range in size from a tiny 1/8 inch to a huge almost 12 inches.
• Butterflies can see the colors red, green, and yellow.
• Some people say that when the black bands on the Woolybear caterpillar
are wide, a cold winter is coming.
• The top butterfly flight speed is 12 miles per hour. Some moths
can fly 25 miles per hour!
• Monarch butterflies journey from the Great Lakes to the Gulf
of Mexico, a distance of about 2,000 miles, and return to the north
again in the spring.
• Butterflies cannot fly if their body temperature is less than
86 degrees.
• Representations of butterflies are seen in Egyptian frescoes
at Thebes, which are 3,500 years old.
• Antarctica is the only continent on which no Butterflies (Lepidoptera)
have been found.
• There are about 24,000 species of butterflies. The moths are
even more numerous: about 140,000 species of them were counted all over
the world.
• The Brimstone butterfly (Gonepterix rhamni) has the longest lifetime
of the adult butterflies: 9-10 months.
• Some Case Moth caterpillars (Psychidae) build a case around themselves
that they always carry with them. It is made of silk and pieces of plants
or soil.
• The caterpillars of some Snout Moths (Pyralididae) live in or
on water-plants.
• The females of some moth species lack wings, all they can do
to move is crawl.
• The Morgan's Sphinx Moth from Madagascar has a proboscis (tube
mouth) that is 12 to 14 inches long to get the nectar from the bottom
of a 12 inch deep orchid discovered by Charles Darwin.
•Some moths never eat anything as adults because they don't have
mouths. They must live on the energy they stored as caterpillars.
•Many butterflies can taste with their feet to find out whether
the leaf they sit on is good to lay eggs on to be their caterpillars'
food or not.
•Butterflies have their skeletons on the outside of their bodies,
called the exoskeleton. This protects them and keeps water inside their
bodies so they don’t dry out.