A Great Mormon basks on top of a Paper Kite next to this Emerald Swallowtail from Southeast Asia.
This info from AMNH: The emerald swallowtail (Papilio palinurus) is sometimes called a banded peacock, but it might just as easily be called a chameleon. Like the shade-shifting lizard, the emerald swallowtail changes color depending on the angle of the light, and it has a strikingly disparate appearance from one side to the other.
The bright bands on the butterfly’s generally dark green upper side aren’t caused by pigments but by the surface of unique microstructures in the scales on its wings. When the scales reflect blue and yellow light, their tight arrangement allows the colors to mix together and be perceived as the iridescent green bands from which the butterfly takes its common name.
This is a microscopic photo of a butterfly egg. Most butterflies deposit a cluster of tiny eggs, sometimes hundreds of them, on the underside of a leaf, fastening them there with a glue-like substance. The leaves provide protection—and later, food—for the young caterpillars. Filmmaker Louie Schwartzberg reveals spectacular natural beauty imperceptible to the human eye.
I believe that Andy Warhol’s painting, Happy Butterfly Days, conquers the challenge of how to depict butterflies in art while paying tribute to their lightness and delicacy.
On another note: Long before the famous Campbell’s Soup can paintings, Andy Warhol worked as a commercial illustrator and excelled at creating fresh, whimsical textile prints at a time when a post-war generation wanted new ideas for ready-to-wear clothes.
They resemble each other but come from the other side of the globe: A White Peacock from North, Central and South America and a Grey Pansy from Southeast Asia.
March 14th is National Learn About Butterflies Day. For the past several years I have posted an interesting fact on Facebook. The responses have been appreciative and grateful!
2024. Today is National Learn About Butterflies Day. Did you know… You can tell if the Monarch is a male by the little black dots on its wings. Monarch males can produce pheromones, which they secrete through special glands on the wings.
2023. Today is National Learn About Butterflies Day. Did you know… Birds are natural predators who eat butterflies and caterpillars? However, sometimes they just coexist in lovely images.
2022. Today is National Learn About Butterflies Day. Did you know… Butterflies have evolved to have many survival techniques to avoid predators, like this Zebra Mosaic. This species is native to Central and South America and notable for its “false head” – special markings on the tail intended to trick predators into biting the wrong end and giving it a chance to escape.
2021. Today is National Learn About Butterflies Day. Did you know… Butterflies have evolved to have many survival techniques to avoid predators. These include warning coloration, camouflage, mimicry and eye spots. This Indian Leafwing remarkable resemblance to a real dead leaf sure tricks predators.
2019. Today is National Learn About Butterflies Day. Did you know… Central Park has several Butterfly gardens that are full of plants, flowers, and shrubs which act as host plants and food sources, from spring through first frost, for a variety of butterfly species. The plants are colorful, beautiful, and provide a wide variety of wonderful fragrances for visitors of all species to enjoy.
Akito Kawahara has spent his life devoted to lepidoptera. Now he’s correcting the record on where they first evolved
Most scientists thought they evolved in Australasia, but it seems most likely that the first butterflies appeared in North and Central America. The ancestor of butterflies was a nocturnal moth that became day-flying here, 101.4 million years ago.
Processing more than 370 million individual DNA pieces, or nucleotides, through models of DNA evolution, the supercomputers calculated the best hypothesis or probability of the butterfly evolutionary tree; then, based on dating and fossils, they estimated the age of every possible branch in the tree.
The result is a beautiful, elaborate diagram that looks more like a wheel than a tree. Besides the breakthrough discoveries into where and when butterflies originated, it demonstrates that 36 tribes of butterflies need to be reclassified—and supports Kawahara’s 2019 hypothesis on how and why moths started flying in the day. Since the oldest intact fossilized butterfly was 55 million years old, and bats evolved in the same era, many scientists had thought that a group of moths became day-flying to escape bat predation. Now we know, thanks in large part to Kawahara’s revelatory work, that butterflies originated over 100 million years ago—some 35 million years before bats. Kawahara thinks that it was bees, not bats, that caused the advent of day-flying moths.
This paragraph was included in the article. Already knew this!
Asked why some butterflies became so beautifully colored, Kawahara offers three generally agreed-upon reasons. “They’re displaying their chemical defense to predators, so birds and lizards, when they see a bright red butterfly, they think, ‘No, I’m not going to eat this thing because it’s toxic.’ Then there’s mimicry. Many butterflies look like the brightly colored toxic ones, but they’re not chemically defended. And lastly for mating. They use their colors to flash and display to the opposite sex.”
Rebeccas Butterfly Reflections 