Butterfly facts

• Butterflies are actually just colourful, day-flying versions of moths. They evolved from moths, and are sometimes exceptionally hard to tell apart from them.
• The wing colours of some butterflies help them keep warm or enable them to fly faster.
• Butterflies don’t just live until sunset: some live for several years, and it depends from species to species, but also from generation to generation.
• Some butterflies can fly so far that they can breach the equivalent distance of the Atlantic Ocean and others can fly as fast as a horse can run.

Yes, butterflies and moths are insects, and they are part of a larger order of winged insects called Lepidoptera.¹

Just like all insects, their bodies are made up of three different segments – a head, a thorax, and an abdomen – they have three pairs of jointed legs, and antennas with which they sense the world. They also have two pairs of wings, like bees.

A whopping 50 new genera of butterflies were discovered in a genetic analysis conducted in 2019.² So, in new calculations from 2023, scientists estimated there are likely about 19,500 different species of butterflies flapping around the world right now.³

“There are many species that are often neglected from this number because they are rare, or extinct,” says study author Akito Y. Kawahara, the curator of the McGuire Center for Lepidoptera at the Florida Museum of Natural History.

While there is a wide variety of species among colourful, winged insects, butterflies are categorised into six main families.⁴ The Hesperiidae family – also dubbed the “skippers” – are small and stocky, with small wings and chubby bodies similar to moths. The Papilionidae butterfly family are brightly coloured butterflies with tails at the end of their large, scalloped wings, which has also coined them the nickname “swallowtail”. The Pieridae come in different shapes and sizes, but their wing colours mostly consist of pale yellows and whites. One species from the Pieridae family, the Common brimstone, has wings that look like light-green leaves.

The Lycaenidae come in vibrant blues and coppers, with males and females often varying greatly in appearance. This is the second-largest family of butterflies. Species from the Nymphalidae family usually come in an assortment of oranges and reds, and their fluffy abdomens shroud their first pair of small legs, often making them look like they have just four legs instead of six. This is the family monarch butterflies belong to. Riodinidae butterflies are also known as metalmarks because the species from this family tend to have small, metal-like spots on their wings.⁵

While moths and butterflies are part of the same family, the Lepidoptera, there are some subtle differences that tell them apart.⁶ Moths mainly fly by night, while butterflies mainly fly by day. Because of their nocturnal habits, moths tend to don much duller brown colours, while butterflies are vibrant and gaudy in the hues on their wings.

Moths are slightly chubbier and chunkier in their body shape. Their front and back wings are held together by a coupling mechanism called the frenulum which allows both sets of wings to move in union. When resting, moths tend to keep their wings flat against the surface they’re on instead of curled behind their back, like butterflies. Moth antennae are more brush and bristle-like, while butterflies have long slender antennae with a little rounded-off piece at the end, like a club.

Still, the diversity is vast. Butterflies also include some moth-like night-flying species with moth-like antennae, says David Lees, curator of Lepidoptera at the Natural History Museum of London. In the highly unusual moth Pemphigostola synemonistis from the Southwest of Madagascar, the male has antennae just like a butterfly, with a club-like shape at the end, whereas the female has simple, thread-like antennae like moths.

Butterflies evolved from moths when some moth species switched up their routine and started foraging during the day instead of the night. “Butterflies are actually just moths. It's just a nomenclature thing,” says Akito Y. Kawahara, the curator of the McGuire Center for Lepidoptera at the Florida Museum of Natural History. “They're actually still moths, really. There's no reason why you should not care about moths and care about butterflies.”

Despite butterflies being so fragile, scientists have found some really ancient butterfly fossils. The oldest one, from what is today Denmark, is a skipper from about 5 million years ago.⁷

There are several theories on when butterflies first emerged. But new data – from the same research that created the world’s largest butterfly tree of life and estimated there are about 19,500 species of butterflies out there right now – supports the theory that butterflies first evolved in Central and western North America in a time called the late Cretaceous.⁸ That was about 100 million years ago, and it means most butterflies survived the mass extinction event that caused dinosaurs to die off.

“This is very cool because it means that butterflies have some features that allow them to survive some major Earth events,” says Kawahara. “Even if the world cooled significantly, many were able to survive, likely due to their ability to have a dormant period and to disperse through flight.” Their flight also came in handy to disperse throughout the world after originating in the Americas, says Kawahara.

Butterflies are part of the order Lepidoptera, a name which comes from the ancient Greek words for scale and wing. The English word “butterfly”, on the other hand, simply evolved from the old English word buttorfleoge, which simply means butter and fly.⁹

Our ancestors may have given the flying insects that name because many butterfly species have pale yellow and beige wings, the colour of butter. Several butterflies over the years have been given fun, fitting names. The Saurona butterfly genus was named in homage to the Eye of Sauron from the Lord of the Rings.¹⁰ A South American butterfly has been named after naturalist Sir David Attenborough: Euptychia attenboroughi.¹¹

Butterflies can be found almost all over the world, in all sorts of habitats, be it arid deserts, humid wetlands, or crisp alpine mountains. They’re found in all continents except Antarctica.

According to current records, Colombia is the country with the most butterfly species – likely because of its lush biodiversity and wide range of habitats.¹² The Polaris Fritillary butterfly and the Northern Clouded Yellow live up at the North Pole, at latitudes north of 81 degrees.¹³

Butterflies can be extremophiles with a passion for heights, says says David Lees, curator of Lepidoptera at the Natural History Museum of London., “sometimes rivalling some alpinists.” In 2024, new research described a brown butterfly genus from the high Andes of South America which rests at 4,800 metres among the snow, and can naturally fly considerably higher.¹⁴

On the Everest expedition of 1921 to 1924, a butterfly collector named Guy Bullock discovered butterflies flying up to 5,640 metres in the glacial moraine above Everest’s Rongbuk Glacier.¹⁵ “He claimed to have seen a red and black one flying at a staggering 6,400 metres,” says Lees. In early August 2024, alpinist Sajid Sadpara filmed a butterfly closely resembling an Indian Tortoiseshell butterfly at Camp 4 of Kanchenjunga, at about 7,500 metres. “If confirmed, that would be a world record,” says Lees.

Butterfly wings aren’t covered in dust per se, they’re covered in hundreds of thousands of miniature, dust-like scales. These scales are basically flattened hairs arranged like shingles on a roof. The scale geometry makes butterfly wings water-repellent, and some studies suggest they help butterflies fly faster.¹⁶

Crucially, these structures give butterflies their shimmery colour. Some scales contain pigments that, in their mosaic-like arrangement, give butterfly wings their vibrant hues arranged in patterns, while other scales simply refract light to create a shimmer. “They also have shapes that allow this to happen, ridges and holes, and physical components the scales that take the wavelength of light and absorb some and then reflect others,” says Akito Y. Kawahara, the curator of the McGuire Center for Lepidoptera at the Florida Museum of Natural History.

The colour of butterfly wings helps with camouflage or self-defence, and research suggests it also helps butterflies regulate their body temperature.¹⁷

Not all butterfly wings are fully covered in dust-like scales, though. Some butterflies and moths have see-through, transparent wings like glass.¹⁸ Being transparent is thought to help them hide from predators, says Kawahara, especially for species that live in dark, shrouded environments. In bright daylight, possessing such a shiny see-through surface might risk reflecting light straight back into a predator’s face.

The Queen Alexandra Birdwing from New Guinea can grow up to around 27cm in wingspan.¹⁹ That’s almost the length of a standard wooden ruler, and just as large as many birds – hence the moniker. This butterfly is so large that when English explorer Albert Stewart Meek first spotted it flying around in the rainforests of New Guinea, he shot at it with his pistol.²⁰

The Western Pygmy Blue Butterfly is as small as 1.2 to 2cm in wingspan.²¹ That’s smaller than several ant species.

All caterpillars become either butterflies or moths, in one of the most beautiful, transformative life cycles on the planet.

A butterfly’s lifecycle is made up of four stages in which the insect undergoes metamorphosis.²² First, adult butterflies lay up to 500 eggs on a plant of their choosing, and usually, each species has evolved to choose a specific  plant that hosts its eggs.

Then, in the next four to five days – or sometimes weeks – the eggs hatch, and a caterpillar comes out. The caterpillar is the butterfly larva, just like ants and bees start off as larvae as well. Caterpillars are super famished, and they eat and eat, sometimes growing as large as 100 times the size they started.²³ How long a butterfly species spends as a caterpillar depends on its species. The woolly bear caterpillar, for instance, survives several years before its next step.²⁴

The fattened caterpillar hides out in a sheltered spot and makes itself a little protective cling wrap called the chrysalis.²⁵ In the chrysalis, the caterpillar basically eats itself: it vomits out some digestive juices that help it break down its body, so the tissue can mix and match back into different body parts. Those cells were primed to become wings and legs from the get-go, and research even suggests some bits and pieces of the caterpillar memory still live on in their winged, adult versions.²⁶

Butterflies come in a wide variety of colours and patterns. The colours on their wings are the basis of almost all aspects of their lives: communicating with each other, scaring off or hiding from predators, and even keeping their bodies at the temperature they need.

Many butterflies use their wing colours to camouflage with the background, looking drab and inconspicuous so to blend in with tree bark or the ground. For instance, when the wings of the Indian leaf butterfly are splayed on their back, they are a shimmery, royal blue, but when they’re folded up straight behind their back, suddenly the butterfly looks just like a dried-up leaf.²⁷ The silver king shoemaker and the pearly leafwing butterflies do the same.²⁸

Some butterflies use their colours as a warning, to tell predators they’re not to be messed with. That’s why monarch butterflies are so beautifully bright orange.

Other butterflies have coloured patterns that make them look like something they are not – whether it's another animal or another species of more dangerous butterfly. Owl butterflies, for instance, have two big eyes drawn on the back of their wings to look somewhat like an owl, likely to scare actual birds from eating them.²⁹ In other species with eye spots on their wings, research shows that spots with glistening centres – likely closer to resembling real eyes – are better at deterring predatory birds.³⁰

In a phenomenon called Batesian mimicry, the Mormon butterflies – which are innocuous – have evolved to look very much like different types of rose butterflies, which are toxic and ill-tasting to predators.³¹

Another crucial function of the colours is to help butterflies find their mates and advertise themselves as the best partners – as butterflies are often dimorphic, which means males and females don different hues to attract each other. “We know that [wing colour] definitely has an impact,” says Akito Y. Kawahara, the curator of the McGuire Center for Lepidoptera at the Florida Museum of Natural History. . Species that have flashy-coloured wings don’t succeed in mating as much if their wings turn dull, or ruined, for instance. Male monarch butterflies with more saturated orange hues on their wings have a better chance of mating, according to some studies.³²

There’s also a correlation between butterfly wing colour and temperature. The colder the temperature in the environment, the more likely some butterfly species are to evolve darker wings to help them absorb heat better – and this is also why some butterflies are changing their colours as climate change alters temperatures around the world.³³

Studies also show that the wings of monarch butterflies that make it through their 2,000-mile-long migration are covered in larger light spots, which likely helps them reduce their drag through the air by slightly tweaking their temperature in different parts of their wings.³⁴

While there’s a lot of fanfare about butterflies only living till sunset, that’s a myth. Butterflies – both in their juvenile caterpillar form and in their adult winged form – vary greatly in their lifespan.³⁵ And variation isn’t just from species to species, but also within a single species, from generation to generation, depending on the time of the year.

For instance, mourning cloak butterflies have two generations in one year. One generation hatches in autumn and lives through winter as an adult butterfly, spending much of the cold months in a relaxed dormant state.³⁶ The following generation starts as an egg in spring, comes out as an adult in May, and dies shortly after in August. “It really really varies,” says Akito Y. Kawahara, the curator of the McGuire Center for Lepidoptera at the Florida Museum of Natural History. “Some species really only live a couple of days as adults. Others can live much longer.”

Butterflies that live in cold environments like mountain peaks usually stay as caterpillars for a whole two years before turning into butterflies, because the plants they eat as caterpillars are only available for a short period of the year.³⁷ “They have a couple weeks to eat, and then it gets cold again, so back into their stage of just dormancy, and they wait until the next year, until the leaves come out again,” says Kawahara.

Butterflies are insects, so they have three pairs of legs and a total of six legs.³⁸ Some butterflies may look like they only have four legs because they tend to stand on just two pairs of them.³⁹ But rest assured, these species still have six legs, it’s just that their two front legs are smaller and hairy, and tucked in closer to their body, so they’re hard to spot. They’ve been dubbed the brush-footed butterflies, or four-footed butterflies.

Similarly, while it may seem butterflies just have two wings, they actually have two pairs of wings, making a total of four wings: two forewings in the front and two hindwings in the back.⁴⁰ Butterfly wings are made up of a ladder-like design of molecules – a shape that prevents bacteria from spreading, and that engineers are trying to copy to make antibacterial objects.⁴¹

Butterflies have two compound eyes. That means that although they have two big eyes on their head, each eye contains thousands of individual prisms inside them. Many butterflies also have simple eyes next to the compound eyes which are specialised to detect movement rather than provide an image, and to detect the horizon to help in navigation.

As a result, butterflies have excellent 360-degree vision. They can also see in colour and are sensitive to different frequencies such as UV, violet, blue, green, red, and broad-spectrum light.⁴² While there are generally three main types of light-sensing receptors, some butterflies, like the common bluebottle butterfly, have 15 classes of light-sensing cells in the eye.⁴³

These are important to see colourful flowers and to see colours in each other.

Sometimes, like in ruddy copper butterflies, photoreceptors differ between males and females too, helping them distinguish between mates and rivals.⁴⁴ This is the case for zebra longwings too: females see UV colours that males cannot thanks to different genes on their sex chromosomes.⁴⁵

Eyes aren’t the only ones doing the seeing, though. Male Japanese yellow swallowtails have photoreceptors on their genitalia: they use those to perceive light and have a successful docking onto females when they mate.⁴⁶

Very little is known about how and what butterflies hear. Many brush-footed butterflies have small ears on their wings, and studies suggest they can hear in the same range as humans.⁴⁷ Research on the blue morpho butterfly, for instance, shows this species can easily distinguish between high and low pitches too.⁴⁸

“The day-flying butterflies with ears probably use their hearing to detect predators such as birds, and the night-flying butterflies use their ears to detect bat echolocation calls,” says Jayne Yack, a butterfly hearing expert from Carleton University in Canada.

Caterpillars munch away at plants, mainly chewing on their leaves, with some species snacking on flowers and seedlings too. Butterflies lay eggs on the plants their caterpillars like to eat, so they have a ready meal as soon as they hatch. The caterpillar crunch is so distinguishable that plants have learned to recognise it too: one study shows tale cress plants produce more defensive mustard oil when they are exposed to the gnawing sound of caterpillars eating nearby.⁴⁹

Some caterpillars are carnivorous and eat ant larvae: they trick worker ants into bringing them back to the ant nest and then betray them by devouring their developing babies.⁵⁰

Adult butterflies can’t chew like caterpillars, though, so they only consume liquid meals.⁵¹ They like the calories and minerals in tree sap and sugary fruits, but their primary meal is the sweet nectar that flowers produce to lure insects in and get pollinated. They slurp up the juicy nectar with a long, straw-like mouthpart called a proboscis.⁵² That’s also how they sip on water from droplets on leaves and muddy puddles to stay hydrated. Some butterflies have been observed slurping on crocodile and turtle tears, likely to get a fix of salts and minerals.

Some flowers have evolved specifically to provide food for butterflies and moths. For instance, the Madagascar star orchid’s flower hides its nectar down a super-long nectar tube. It was so unusual that Charles Darwin spent a long time wondering what creature could possibly reach so far down the flower to access its sweet reward. Soon after, scientists discovered a moth with a 30cm-long proboscis that was just right for the job.⁵³

Yes, butterflies taste with their feet. While they do have some taste cells inside their tube-like mouths, and some on the antennae which they use to sense the world around them, butterflies have most of their taste receptors on their feet.⁵⁴ “A scientist called Dwight Minnich first discovered this in 1922,” says David Lees, curator of Lepidoptera at the Natural History Museum of London. . “He noticed that red admirals immediately stuck out their tongues when he lowered the four walking legs onto a solution and could respond to sugar, salt, and water.”

These come in handy when a butterfly needs to figure out whether a plant is suitable for laying eggs: it’ll use its feet to taste a plant’s sugary oils to deliberate whether it’ll be a nutritious snack for its caterpillars. For instance, the red admiral female drums with its much smaller forelegs to check the host plant is a stinging nettle, which it likes to lay its eggs on. In cabbage white butterflies, taste receptors on the antennae are also important to taste the bitter compounds in the Brassica plant so loved by their caterpillars, according to Lees. Some moths use sensors in the abdomen tip when egg-laying.

Yes, butterflies are pollinators. They’ve evolved together with flowers to accidentally spread their pollen around when they reach inside the flower’s crown to slurp up their nectar meal. The electrostatic charge accumulated by butterflies while they fly also helps them shake pollen around and help flowers reproduce, according to studies.⁵⁵

Butterflies pollinate a wide variety of plants, from flowers to vegetables and herbs, from grasslands to jungles. A study from 2021 calculated that butterflies are also super important for pollinating cotton fields, for instance.⁵⁶

No. Butterflies cannot bite because they have no teeth and no jaws.⁵⁷

Butterflies also cannot sting. Although their proboscis is similar to that of mosquitoes and other stinging insects, most cannot actually puncture through the skin.

That said, one group of moths – called vampire moths – do drink blood. Like mosquitoes, they puncture the skin of vertebrates and lap up the blood with their straw-like proboscis.⁵⁸ Some of the vampire moth’s sister species also use their proboscis to pierce fruits.⁵⁹

Several butterfly species are toxic to their predators. In most cases, they become toxic by eating poisonous plants: although they evolved genes to break down those toxins and remain unaffected, whatever bird tries to munch down on them will get an upset stomach as a result.⁶⁰

Monarch butterflies become toxic because their caterpillars only feed on milkweed. Heliconiine butterflies end up containing cyanide-releasing compounds because as caterpillars they have a penchant for Passiflora plants.⁶¹

Some species of milkweed butterflies – of which monarchs are a part of – also steal toxic juices from caterpillars of their own species.⁶²

“The ones that are bad to eat are typically very conspicuous, and the reason is they, they're displaying the fact that they're toxic to their predators,” says Akito Y. Kawahara, the curator of the McGuire Center for Lepidoptera at the Florida Museum of Natural History. . Most toxic butterflies can be found in the tropics, he says.

Studies suggest that some animals have evolved the ability to snack on the same toxins that monarchs like to snack on and exhibit too: the black-headed grosbeak bird and the eastern deer mouse have monarch-like genetic mutations that let them stomach the poison.⁶³

Butterflies find their mates by letting colours and scent guide them, sometimes sensing cues even from kilometres away.⁶⁴ Then, in many species of butterflies, males carry out a dancing courtship ritual to impress the female and then land on to her for mating. Monarch butterflies, for instance, fly around the females, chase them, and even take them down while in flight.⁶⁵

Mating happens abdomen to abdomen, but facing opposite directions. Some species resort to creative mating techniques, though. Apollo butterfly males, for instance, plug the genital openings of butterflies they’ve mated with so they’re not able to mate with anybody else.⁶⁶ This gives those males a higher chance of passing on their genes. Research is starting to suggest female Apollo butterflies have evolved bigger genital openings that cannot be plugged, in return, but it’s a constant evolutionary tug of war.⁶⁷

Yes, butterflies lay eggs. Each butterfly lays from one to hundreds of eggs.

After mating, most female butterflies (not all) lay their eggs on the leaves their caterpillar babies most like to eat once they hatch.⁶⁸ These plants are called host plants, and each species of butterfly has its own preference. Research suggests butterflies lay their eggs in strategic positions to avoid risks like predators, but also the risk of being munched away by the caterpillars that hatch early.⁶⁹

Butterflies are so strategic in their egg-laying that when monarch butterflies are infected by parasites – a common disease among the flying insect – they choose to lay their eggs on the most toxic milkweed they can find, as the toxicity of the plant helps rid their offspring of the possibility of being infected by the same parasite.⁷⁰

Most butterflies overwinter as caterpillars, chrysalises, or adult butterflies in dormant stages. But some butterfly species migrate to go looking for heat. The most famous migration is that of the orange monarch butterfly: these butterflies migrate from Canada to Mexico and California during winter to chase the warmth, and then migrate back up north to go looking for milkweed and lay their eggs.⁷¹

The painted lady butterfly also migrates, covering a vast 9,000-mile journey from Africa to the Arctic over the course of up to six successive generations.⁷² Studies suggest one butterfly alone can carry out the entire 4,200-kilometre Atlantic Ocean journey.⁷³

Like all insects, butterflies are declining in number. Warming, habitat destruction, and the use of pesticides cause harm to butterflies, depleting their populations.⁷⁴ Pollution also confuses butterflies, making it hard for them to pollinate flowers and find their meals.⁷⁵

“There are some exceptions, but the exceptions are kind of unusual anomalies or species that tend to be able to survive in habitats that are somewhat disturbed by human activity,” says Kawahara.

Half of British butterfly species are listed as threatened or near threatened by the IUCN.⁷⁶ Almost half of all butterflies that were present in Singapore have disappeared in the past 160 years.⁷⁷ Monarch butterflies were labelled as endangered by the IUCN, but have now been classified as vulnerable because experts think we need more data about how they’re doing.⁷⁸

One of the factors that’s most impacting butterflies is warming weather. For instance, climate change makes caterpillars hatch at a time when some of their preferred snacking plants might not have emerged yet, leaving them without enough food for the season.⁷⁹ Other studies suggest that for every 1°C rise in spring temperatures, some caterpillar species hatch from their eggs between one and nine days earlier.⁸⁰

Experiments suggest warmer climates cause some butterflies to grow smaller and produce fewer eggs.⁸¹ Some butterflies may lose their spots and vibrant colours too, and evolve to don blander, paler colors so to attract less heat.⁸²

For all of these reasons, the butterflies that are living on mountaintops are disappearing, says Akito Y. Kawahara, the curator of the McGuire Center for Lepidoptera at the Florida Museum of Natural History. “There's no question about it, we can't find these butterflies anymore.”

Most butterflies do not have organs specialised to make sounds, but they can make subtle sounds by flapping their wings together.

Some species are an exception, though. The Hamadryas butterfly, often also dubbed the “cracker”, has tiny sound-producing organs on its front wings. It makes crackling, clicking sounds, like miniature finger snaps at a 13-15 kHz frequency.⁸³

Header image © Shutterstock

Fun fact image © Shutterstock

Interviews with Akito Y. Kawahara, the curator of the McGuire Center for Lepidoptera at the Florida Museum of Natural History, and David Lees, curator of Lepidoptera at the Natural History Museum of London, were conducted over Zoom in June 2024.

Learn more about them here:

• https://www.floridamuseum.ufl.edu/kawahara-lab/personnel/principal-investigator;
• https://www.nhm.ac.uk/our-science/departments-and-staff/staff-directory/david-lees.html.

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