There are 165000 butterfly species living on our Planet. And they are way more special than we could even imagine!
Picture credit: @giuliegiordi
- Butterflies use their feet to taste, not a tongue as we do.
- There’s a group of butterflies called night butterflies that have ears on their wings to avoid being picked off and eaten by bats.
- Butterflies are cold-blooded! They can’t fly if their body temperature is less than 30 degrees Celsius.
- Butterflies don’t have a mouth; instead they ‘suck’ food up with a kind of drinking-straw-like apparatus called a proboscis.
- Butterflies are picky about what they eat, usually sucking nectar from flowers that have single petals; colors like red, purple, yellow and pink are particular favorites. But some butterflies like the Red Admiral are more glutton than gourmet; they prefer feeding on rotting fruit and animal dung.
- Butterfly wings are actually transparent. What we see as color isn’t pigment but light reflected off the scales on their wings.
- Female Queen Alexandra butterflies of Papua New Guinea are the world’s largest, with a wing size of nearly 26cm.
- Antarctica is the only continent on the planet that has no butterflies.
- Butterflies have their skeletons on the outside of their bodies (called the exoskeleton); this protects them and keeps water inside their bodies so that they don’t dry out.
- During the time from hatching to pupation, a caterpillar increases its body size an astonishing 30,000 times or more.
@Matildaknows it's important to be kind to our Planet for even the most fragile parts of it to have a chance to survive! Stay minimalist with our daily neutrals!
