145 Fun Facts About Butterflies

What are the four stages of a butterfly's life cycle, in order?

Egg, larva, pupa, adult: because the caterpillar and the winged adult look so different and eat different foods, young and adults never compete with each other for a meal.

What is the primary function of a butterfly's proboscis?

To sip liquid food: an adult butterfly has no chewing jaws, so everything it eats must be drunk through the proboscis, two long halves linked together into a tube that coils up when not in use.

What is the technical term for a fully developed adult butterfly?

Imago is Latin for 'image': naturalists saw the winged adult as the true image of its species, revealed once the larva, a word that is Latin for 'mask', had been cast off.

In chaos theory's 'butterfly effect', a butterfly flapping its wings in Brazil might set off what in Texas?

A tornado: meteorologist Edward Lorenz posed the question in a 1972 talk, after finding that rounding off the numbers fed into his computer weather model produced a completely different forecast.

Each of a butterfly's two large eyes is a mosaic of many tiny lenses; what is this kind of eye called?

A compound eye gives no sharp image, but it has a wide field of view and is very good at detecting movement, so a butterfly picks out flower shapes and motion yet cannot see distant objects clearly.

How many legs does an adult butterfly typically have?

Six, in three pairs, is the body plan butterflies share with every other insect, from beetles to bees, and the reason eight-legged spiders are not counted as insects at all.

Before laying eggs, a female butterfly checks that a leaf will suit her caterpillars by tasting it with which body part?

Her feet carry taste sensors that work only on contact, so simply by landing on a leaf she can tell whether her caterpillars will be able to eat it before she lays a single egg.

To which scientific order do butterflies and moths belong?

Butterflies and moths belong to the order Lepidoptera, a name derived from Greek words meaning "scaly wings," referring to their distinctive wing scales.

Which wing markings do some butterflies flash to startle an attacking bird?

Eyespots look like the eyes of a larger animal: in tests, birds hesitated far longer before attacking butterflies that showed their spots than ones whose spots were covered, and some fled without attacking.

Queen Alexandra's birdwing, the world's largest butterfly, lives only in which country?

Papua New Guinea: the giant, whose females can span more than 25 cm, survives only in scattered pockets of rainforest in Oro Province, after the 1951 eruption of nearby Mount Lamington destroyed much of its former range.

A butterfly's exoskeleton is built mainly from what material?

Chitin gives the outer skin its toughness, but only once it has set: straight after a moult the new skin is pale and soft, and it expands before hardening within a couple of hours.

What is it called when male butterflies crowd onto damp soil or wet sand to drink?

Puddling is mostly a male habit: the nutrients drawn from the mud are thought to be handed to the female during mating as a 'nuptial gift', which improves the survival of her eggs.

Unlike most moths, how do most butterflies hold their wings when perched?

Folded upright above the back is the usual butterfly pose, where most moths spread their wings flat or hold them like a tent over the body; skippers break the rule and often perch with wings half open.

Once its wings have dried, what happens to the size of an adult butterfly?

It never grows again: every bit of a butterfly's growing is done as a caterpillar, which outgrows and sheds its skin several times, so a small butterfly is not a young one.

Heliconius butterflies are unusual among adult butterflies for feeding on what?

Most adult butterflies live on liquids alone, but Heliconius species collect pollen with the proboscis and digest its amino acids, which helps them live for several months instead of weeks.

What gives a Blue Morpho butterfly's wings their iridescent blue?

The Blue Morpho's colour is structural coloration: the wings hold no blue pigment, and microscopic ridges on the scales reflect blue light, producing an iridescence that shifts with viewing angle.

The antennae of most butterflies differ from those of most moths by having what feature?

Clubbed tips are the quickest way to tell a butterfly, since moth antennae are usually feathery or saw-edged, though a few day-flying moths carry clubs too and one African butterfly has none.

What term describes a non-toxic butterfly evolving to resemble a toxic species to deter predators?

Batesian mimicry, named after Henry Walter Bates who described it in Amazonian butterflies, is a harmless species copying a toxic one's warning pattern; if mimics grow too common, predators stop avoiding it.

Butterflies have four wings; which insect has only two?

A housefly: most flying insects have four wings, but in true flies the hind pair has shrunk into tiny knobs that work like gyroscopes to keep the insect balanced in flight.

Unlike most moths, when are most butterflies active?

Most butterflies are active during the day: they are diurnal, basking in sunlight to warm their flight muscles before flying, whereas the great majority of moths fly at night.

The painted lady's scientific name, Vanessa cardui, points to which prickly plants that its caterpillars prefer?

Thistles: the name comes from carduus, Latin for a wild thistle, and although the caterpillars will accept hundreds of other plants, thistles are the ones they favour.

What tiny structures cover a butterfly's wings, giving them their color and patterns?

Butterfly wings are covered in thousands of tiny, overlapping scales, which are modified hairs, responsible for their vibrant colors and intricate patterns.

What primary sensory function do a butterfly's antennae perform?

Smelling is the antennae's main job: they are covered in tiny sensors that sample the air for scents, including the chemical signals butterflies give off when courting.

Caterpillars spin silk from glands that open on which body part?

The lower lip, or labium, carries a tubular spinneret: the silk leaves it as a liquid, hardens into thread in the air, and is laid down as lines, pads and the button the caterpillar hangs from to pupate.

What happens to most of a caterpillar's body inside the pupa?

It dissolves into a soup: the caterpillar releases enzymes that digest its own tissues, and small clusters of cells that survive use the broth to build the wings, eyes and legs of the adult.

In classical myth, the butterfly-winged princess Psyche became the immortal wife of which god?

Cupid, the Greek Eros, lost Psyche when she broke his trust and took her back only after trials set by his jealous mother, Venus; artists often show her with a butterfly's wings.

A butterfly's wings and legs are all attached to which section of its body?

The thorax, the middle section, is the engine room: it carries every leg and wing and is packed with the muscles that drive them, while the abdomen behind it holds the gut and reproductive organs.

Besides colour, what do the scales on a butterfly's wings provide?

Insulation: the overlapping scales trap a layer of air that helps the butterfly hold heat for flight; they also detach easily, which lets a butterfly slip free of a spider's web.

The painted lady, found on most continents, once had what fitting name in North America?

Cosmopolitan butterfly suited a restless species: it lives year-round only in warm regions, so fresh migrants recolonise Europe every spring, and in some years they get as far as Iceland.

Europe's painted ladies make a round trip, spread over up to six generations, between the Arctic Circle and which continent?

Africa: no single butterfly makes the whole journey, and the autumn flight south went unnoticed for years because, as radar later showed, the insects travel on fast winds high above the ground.

The red admiral caterpillar's primary host plant is what?

Stinging nettle (Urtica dioica) is the red admiral caterpillar's main food plant; the larva folds a nettle leaf into a silk-bound tent. Adults are famously tame, often landing on people as perches.

Large blue caterpillars trick Myrmica ants into carrying them home, then eat what?

They eat ant eggs and larvae: once a Myrmica worker carries it into the nest, the large blue caterpillar lives underground for most of a year feeding on the ant brood before pupating there.

The endangered Karner blue butterfly's life cycle depends entirely on which wildflower, its caterpillars' only food?

Lupine needs open, sunny ground: once wildfires were suppressed, shrubs and trees shaded the plant out, and the butterfly that can eat nothing else vanished along with it.

Which novelist first identified and described the Karner blue butterfly?

Vladimir Nabokov, a serious butterfly scientist as well as a novelist, described the Karner blue in 1944 and later slipped a group of them, unnamed, into his novel Pnin.

Which ancient Chinese philosopher dreamed he was a butterfly, then woke unsure whether he was a butterfly dreaming of being a man?

Zhuangzi tells the story at the end of his book's second chapter, and the 'butterfly dream' became so well known that whole plays have been written around it.

Which San Francisco butterfly, last seen in the 1940s, is thought to be the first US butterfly lost to urban development?

The Xerces blue lived only in the coastal dunes of San Francisco's Sunset District and was last seen in the early 1940s; the Xerces Society for invertebrate conservation takes its name from it.

Monarch caterpillars store milkweed poisons that attack which organ?

Heart poisons called cardenolides pass from the milkweed into the caterpillar and on into the adult; a predator need taste one only once to learn to leave the orange-and-black pattern alone.

In Mexico, which animal eats dozens of overwintering monarchs in a single night?

The black-eared mouse eats around 40 monarchs a night at the Mexican roosts: it shrugs off their milkweed poisons, and mice that move into the roosts grow larger and breed more than those outside.

How do autumn monarchs know the way to their Mexican winter forests?

Instinct: the butterflies that left Mexico in spring died several generations earlier, so every autumn migrant is heading for mountains it has never seen.

Monarch Watch volunteers help map the autumn migration by doing what to thousands of butterflies?

Tagging their wings: each lightweight sticker carries a unique code, so a butterfly marked in the north and found again in Mexico shows where the migrants come from and how many survive the trip.

Which magazine's August 1976 cover showed Catalina Trail blanketed in monarchs?

National Geographic's cover story told the world of the find Catalina Trail and Kenneth Brugger made in January 1975, which ended Fred Urquhart's 38-year search for the place the butterflies spend the winter.

The Monarch Butterfly Biosphere Reserve lies about 100 km northwest of where?

Mexico City is the nearest big landmark to the mountain reserve, where tens of thousands of butterflies can settle on a single tree and branches sag, and sometimes snap, under their weight.

Illegal logging of which fir trees threatens the monarchs' Mexican overwintering forests?

Oyamel fir forests hold a cool, humid microclimate that shelters the roosting butterflies on freezing nights and keeps them from drying out, letting them save their energy through the winter.

A monarch caterpillar's growth stages between moults are each called what?

An instar: a caterpillar outgrows its skin instead of stretching it, so it grows in jumps, and the monarch's five instars take it from a few millimetres long at hatching to between four and five centimetres.

What is the first thing a newly hatched monarch caterpillar eats?

Its own egg case is the first meal: the hatchling eats the shell it has just left, then starts on the milkweed, feeding in a circle that leaves a telltale arc-shaped hole in the leaf.

A monarch butterfly emerges after roughly how long inside the pupa?

Two weeks at most: in summer warmth the pupa takes one to two weeks, and about a day before the adult emerges the green case turns transparent, showing the orange-and-black wings folded inside.

Rajah Brooke's birdwing is named after James Brooke, the adventurer who became 'White Rajah' of where?

Sarawak, on Borneo, was Brooke's own kingdom; a naturalist who stayed at his house in the 1850s named the velvet-black and green butterfly, 'one of the most elegant species known', in his host's honour.

Which British butterfly hibernates as an adult and hisses by rubbing its wings when disturbed?

The peacock winters in sheds and hollow trees, where it is too dark for its wing pattern to scare anything; the hiss made by rubbing its wings is what sends a foraging rodent on its way.

In one popular theory, the word 'butterfly' began as 'butter-coloured fly', a description of which British species?

Brimstone is an old word for sulphur, the colour of the male's wings; dictionaries call the origin of 'butterfly' obscure, though, and a rival story has the insects stealing butter and milk.

The mourning cloak's British name recalls which south London district, where two were caught in 1748?

Camberwell gave the Camberwell beauty its name, yet the butterfly has never settled in Britain: those seen are rare migrants from Scandinavia and mainland Europe.

Which butterfly was designated Florida's state butterfly in 1996?

The zebra longwing (Heliconius charithonia) became Florida's state butterfly in 1996; its black wings with pale yellow stripes warn predators that its body carries cyanide-based toxins.

How do Heliconius charithonia adults spend the night?

In a shared roost: the same group gathers night after night for safety from predators, the oldest butterflies claim the best places, and early in the morning they nudge the others into action.

Heliconius caterpillars feed on the vines of which plant?

Passion flower vines are the only food of Heliconius caterpillars, and at least one species gets past the plant's defensive hairs by biting off the tips or laying mats of silk over them.

Alfred Russel Wallace said netting his 'golden birdwing' set his heart beating violently; which region was he exploring?

The Malay Archipelago: Wallace netted Ornithoptera croesus on the island of Bacan, felt closer to fainting than he ever had when in fear of death, and had a headache for the rest of the day.

Linnaeus named the gulf fritillary 'vanillae' after a 1705 painting by which naturalist?

Maria Sibylla Merian painted the butterfly on a vanilla plant in her 1705 book on the insects of Surinam; Linnaeus took 'vanillae' from that plate, though its caterpillars never eat vanilla.

John White, who painted the earliest known picture of a North American butterfly in 1587, was governor of which ill-fated colony?

Roanoke: White painted an eastern tiger swallowtail, sailed home for supplies, and returned in 1590 to find the colony deserted and his granddaughter Virginia Dare gone with it.

Tests in 1991 showed birds find the viceroy as foul-tasting as the monarch it resembles, making it which kind of mimic?

Müllerian: in 1991 Ritland and Brower found birds rejected wingless viceroy bodies as readily as monarchs, so the two unpalatable species share the cost of teaching predators rather than one copying the other.

Unlike the milkweed-eating monarch it resembles, the viceroy raises its caterpillars on which trees?

Willows, along with their relatives the poplars and cottonwoods: the caterpillars store the bitter salicylic acid from the foliage, which upsets the stomach of a predator that eats one.

Owl butterflies of the genus Caligo prefer to fly at what time of day?

Dusk: Caligo butterflies fly in the evening when insect-eating birds are scarce, which suits an insect that flutters only a few metres at a time; the genus name is Latin for 'darkness'.

The glasswing butterfly's see-through wings mainly help it do what?

Hide from predators: with only the dark wing borders showing, a glasswing on the move is hard for a hunting bird to track.

In Spanish-speaking regions the glasswing butterfly is called espejitos, meaning what?

Espejitos means 'little mirrors', a nickname for the clear wing panels, yet they are built not to shine: a coat of microscopic pillars cuts reflections at every angle, so the insect does not glint.

Kallima inachus is famous for closed wings that resemble what?

A dead leaf: the closed underside shows a midrib line, vein marks and mottled decay spots; open, the same wings flash a black tip, orange band and deep blue base.

Collectors once lured male purple emperors down from the oak canopy using what bait?

Rotting animal carcasses, 'in a somewhat advanced stage of decay', were the classic lure, one an old field guide called 'unsportsmanlike'; the males ignore flowers and come down for dung and carrion.

Papilio machaon, the swallowtail, is named after an army surgeon in the Iliad who was the son of which Greek god?

Asclepius, the god of healing, fathered Machaon, who tended the Greek wounded at Troy until he was himself shot by Paris; Linnaeus gave the butterfly his name in 1758.

Swallowtail caterpillars fend off attackers with a forked, smelly organ called what?

The osmeterium is a forked orange gland that stays hidden until the caterpillar is threatened, then inflates with fluid and pops out from behind the head, releasing a pungent smell.

Which butterfly's caterpillar passes for a bird dropping?

The giant swallowtail's caterpillar, the 'orange dog' of citrus groves, keeps its bird-dropping colours as it grows; if attacked it pushes out a forked gland that reeks and tries to wipe it on the attacker.

The red-spotted purple fools birds by copying which foul-tasting butterfly?

Pipevine swallowtail caterpillars keep the poisons of the Aristolochia vines they eat and stay toxic as adults, so a bird that has tasted one also leaves its harmless dark look-alikes alone.

Which species is Australia's largest endemic butterfly?

The Cairns birdwing, with females up to around 15 cm across, is Australia's largest endemic butterfly; Priam's birdwing is bigger and also flies in Australia, but it ranges into New Guinea so is not endemic.

The electric-blue Ulysses butterfly is a tourism emblem of which Australian state?

Queensland used the Ulysses (Papilio ulysses) as a tourism emblem for its tropical north; males are so drawn to blue that they sometimes court blue objects mistaken for females.

Collector Albert Meek took the first Queen Alexandra's birdwing in 1906 using what?

A shotgun: the giant flies high in the rainforest canopy, so Meek shot the first specimen down, but he soon found the caterpillars and reared most of his later specimens instead.

Which butterfly is the smallest in North America?

The western pygmy blue, with a wingspan of just 12 to 20 mm, is a butterfly of deserts and salt marshes that has nonetheless reached Hawaii and settled along the Persian Gulf.

The Atala butterfly's caterpillars feed on which native Florida cycad?

Coontie (Zamia integrifolia) is the only cycad native to Florida, and the Atala's caterpillars also take exotic cycads, so many colonies now live in suburban gardens planted with them.

Which British prime minister bred butterflies at his Kent home and planted buddleia there to bring more into the garden?

Winston Churchill planted the bushes himself, and a friend recalled him bemoaning a bad summer for butterflies until, to his delight, two red admirals settled on his buddleia.

The chequered skipper died out in England in 1976; in which part of Britain did it hang on?

Western Scotland: its stronghold is around Fort William, where the caterpillars eat purple moor-grass; changes in woodland management wiped out the English colonies, and a reintroduction to Rockingham Forest began in 2018.

The comma butterfly's white comma-shaped mark sits where?

Underside of the hindwing, so the mark shows only when the wings are shut; the comma itself went through a severe decline in Britain and then came back, and its range is still spreading north.

The small cabbage white reached North America around 1860 via which Canadian province?

Quebec was the butterfly's first North American foothold, in the 1860s; an accidental arrival, it spread across the whole continent and later reached Hawaii, New Zealand and Australia in the same way.

Skippers are named for their darting flight; how are the tips of their antennae shaped?

Hooked: the tip bends back like a crochet hook, and skippers looked different enough from other butterflies to be filed for years in a superfamily of their own before being moved in with the rest.

Prodryas persephone, a fossil butterfly, was buried about 34 million years ago by what?

Volcanic ash settling on the bed of an ancient Colorado lake sealed it in paper-thin shale at Florissant, where homesteader Charlotte Hill dug up one of the finest fossils the site has ever yielded.

DNA evidence suggests the first butterflies shared the world with which animals?

Dinosaurs: family trees built from DNA put the first butterflies about 100 million years ago in what is now the Americas, although the oldest fossil butterfly yet found is only about 55 million years old.

Roughly how many butterfly species are there worldwide?

Around 20,000 species, in just seven families: moths outnumber butterflies roughly nine to one, so the showy day-fliers are only a small branch of their order.

Butterflies live on every continent except which one?

Antarctica is the only continent without butterflies: it has just two native flowering plants, and far too little warmth for insects that must heat their flight muscles in the sun.

How does a warmed-up butterfly keep from overheating?

A butterfly turns its wings edge-on to the sun once it is hot, closing them so they catch less heat, the reverse of the spread-winged basking it does on a cool morning.

The tiny funnel-shaped openings that let sperm into a butterfly egg are called what?

Micropyles are tiny channels at the top of the egg through which sperm enter as it is laid; the hard ridged shell, the chorion, is lined with wax to stop it drying out.

The spiny pad at the tail of a butterfly pupa that hooks it to a silk button is the what?

The cremaster's tiny hooks catch in a pad of silk that the caterpillar spins beforehand; most pupae then hang head-down from it, while some species add a silk girdle around the middle to stay head-up.

'Chrysalis', the word for a butterfly's pupa, comes from the Ancient Greek for which metal?

Gold: 'chrysalis' comes from the Greek chrysos, 'gold', because many pupae, such as the monarch's, carry metallic gold spots or a golden sheen.

A freshly emerged butterfly inflates its crumpled wings by pumping in what?

Hemolymph, the insect's blood, is pumped through the wing veins to expand the crumpled wings; until they dry and stiffen the insect is helpless and at its most vulnerable to predators.

'Hilltopping', where males patrol ridge tops and summits, is a strategy for what?

Finding mates: hilltopping males wait at summits where receptive females of sparse populations fly up to meet them; a landmark makes a reliable rendezvous for insects that would otherwise rarely meet.

Butterflies that land on people to sip sweat are after which mineral?

Sodium: flowers supply very little of it, and some species need more than any nectar can provide, so they make up the shortfall from sweat, tears, dung and damp ground.

Migrating butterflies steer with a time-compensated compass based on what?

The sun: monarchs use a time-compensated sun compass, with a clock in the antennae correcting for the sun's movement across the sky; they also see polarised light, which keeps them on course under cloud.

US butterfly numbers did what between 2000 and 2020?

Fell by a fifth: a 2025 study in Science pooled 12.6 million sightings from 76,000 surveys and found numbers down 22%, with 13 times as many species declining as increasing.

The ancient Greek word for butterfly, psyche, primarily means what?

Soul: the Greeks pictured the departed soul as a winged creature, and a Roman sculpture shows a butterfly leaving a dead man's mouth as his soul slips away.

A person who studies butterflies and moths was archaically called what?

An aurelian, from 'aurelia', an old word for a chrysalis; Moses Harris used the name as the title of his celebrated 1766 book on English butterflies and moths, The Aurelian.

Who became President of the UK charity Butterfly Conservation in 1998?

David Attenborough became President of Butterfly Conservation in 1998; in 2010 the charity launched the Big Butterfly Count, a summer tally by the public that it calls the world's largest butterfly survey.

Buddleja davidii, the 'butterfly bush' of countless gardens, originally comes from where?

China is its home; Oregon lists it as a noxious weed, and it feeds adult butterflies but almost no caterpillars.

Danaus chrysippus, the plain tiger, is also known as the African what?

The African queen, also called the African monarch: its milkweed diet makes it emetic to predators, so other butterflies, such as female Hypolimnas misippus, copy its orange-and-black pattern.

A monarch caterpillar about to pupate hangs upside down in the shape of which letter?

J is the letter a monarch caterpillar forms once it has latched onto its silk pad with its last pair of hind legs.

A monarch's green pupal case forms inside the caterpillar; what does the caterpillar do to reveal it?

The caterpillar sheds its skin one last time, and within a few minutes the striped coat peels away from the pupa that formed underneath.

Shortly before a monarch butterfly emerges, how does the wall of its green pupal case change?

It turns transparent within about 12 hours of emergence, so the folded orange-and-black wings show clearly through the wall.

What does a female butterfly use to fasten each of her eggs firmly to a food plant?

Glue that hardens rapidly anchors each egg, and it can be seen as a tiny ring around the egg's base.

A caterpillar chews leaves, but what do most adult butterflies mainly feed on once they have wings?

Nectar from flowers is the main food of most adult butterflies, which rely on its sugars for the energy to fly.

A female monarch lays her eggs one at a time, most often on which part of a milkweed plant?

Under a young leaf is the usual spot for each single egg, and a female that mates several times can lay more than a thousand.

The word pupa, borrowed by Linnaeus for the resting stage of an insect, is Latin for what?

Doll is the meaning Linnaeus drew on in 1758; the Latin pupa also meant 'girl' and 'puppet', and he used it for an undeveloped creature.

The English word caterpillar probably comes from an Old French name that literally means what?

Hairy cat is the literal sense of Old North French catepelose, probably a nod to woolly caterpillars. The French word chenille likewise means 'little dog'.

Gardeners often find caterpillars by spotting their tiny dark droppings, which entomologists call what?

Frass is the term for the solid waste of insects, borrowed from the German Fraß, a word for an animal's feeding.

Caterpillars of the harvester, North America's only carnivorous butterfly, eat which insects instead of leaves?

Aphids are the harvester caterpillar's prey, which makes the species the only obligate carnivore among North America's butterflies.

Entomologists use which term for the moment an adult butterfly splits its pupal case and climbs out?

Eclosion is the act of emerging from the pupal case, and the empty shell left hanging behind has its own name: an exuvia.

Butterfly eggs laid just before winter can halt their development until spring in a state called what?

Diapause is the resting state that delays hatching until spring, and it is not only for eggs: some pupae sit in it for more than ten months.

Which clusters of cells inside a caterpillar grow into the adult butterfly's wings and legs in the pupa?

Imaginal discs lie waiting in the larva and build the outer parts of the adult; their role was first worked out by the Dutch microscopist Jan Swammerdam.

Which chemical signal keeps a caterpillar a caterpillar, letting it pupate only once the level drops?

Juvenile hormone ensures the larva grows while blocking the change to an adult. Synthetic mimics of it are used as insecticides that stop pests from ever maturing.

The hard, ridged outer shell that protects a butterfly egg is known to biologists by which name?

Chorion is the egg's ridged shell, and it is lined with a thin coat of wax that stops the egg drying out before the caterpillar is ready to hatch.

Caterpillars chew through leaves with which hard mouthparts, which nearly all adult butterflies and moths lack?

Mandibles are the caterpillar's chewing jaws. Nearly all adults lose them, though a few primitive moth families keep chewing jaws for life.

Through which small openings along the sides of its body does a caterpillar take in the air it breathes?

Spiracles line the sides of the thorax and abdomen and feed air into the tracheae, a network of tubes that supplies the body with oxygen.

Which insects kill many young butterflies by laying their own eggs inside the eggs and caterpillars?

Parasitic wasps such as braconids lay their eggs in the eggs or larvae, and the wasp grubs devour their host, leaving a dried-out husk.

Swallowtail pupae usually sit head-up instead of hanging; what holds them upright against a twig?

A silk girdle spun by the caterpillar keeps the pupa head-up while its tail end stays anchored; most other butterfly pupae simply hang head-down.

Spicebush swallowtail caterpillars scare off birds with two bold dots on a swollen thorax that mimic what?

A snake is the usual reading of the disguise: the dots sit like eyes on the swollen thorax, and a disturbed caterpillar rears up and pulls in its real head.

Butterfly pupae usually hang bare, but most moth caterpillars first spin which silk shelter?

Cocoon is the silk case most moth caterpillars spin before pupating; a few butterflies, such as the Parnassius species, make a flimsy one too.

Many moths have ears on their bodies, tuned to the high-pitched hunting calls of which predators?

Bats hunt by ultrasound, and a moth that hears it can dodge or drop out of the air; some moths even click back to foil the echolocation.

Many male moths have large feathery antennae that can pick up what from as far as a kilometer away?

A female's scent, a plume of pheromones, can be tracked by a male from up to a kilometer off; she stays put while he follows the trail to her.

The day-flying hawk-moth Macroglossum stellatarum hovers at flowers and is often mistaken for which bird?

Hummingbird is the lookalike that gives the moth its common name: it hovers in bright sunshine and feeds from tube-shaped flowers through a long tongue.

Adult luna moths live for only about a week and never do which of these things in that time?

Eat is the one thing they cannot do: adult luna moths have only vestigial mouthparts and no digestive system, so they run on reserves stored as caterpillars.

Caterpillars of the domestic silk moth, farmed for at least 5,000 years, feed on leaves of which tree?

Mulberry leaves, above all white mulberry, are almost the silkworm's only food; the moth was bred from a wild cousin, Bombyx mandarina, with which it can still interbreed.

The banded woolly bear, a fuzzy caterpillar said in folklore to forecast winter, grows up to be what?

Isabella tiger moth is the adult form. The caterpillar gets through winter by letting most of its body freeze solid, protected by an antifreeze it makes in its tissues, then thaws in spring.

Inchworms, the caterpillars that walk by arching their bodies into loops, grow up to be which insects?

Geometer moths take their name from the Greek for 'earth-measurer', a nod to the way their caterpillars loop along as if pacing out a journey.

Certain moths live as adults in the fur of which rainforest mammal, laying their eggs in its dung?

Sloth fur is home to these moths, and when the animal climbs down about once a week to relieve itself, the females fly off to lay eggs in the droppings.

Moths far outnumber butterflies; roughly how many species of moth are thought to exist worldwide?

160,000 is the usual estimate for moth species, many of them not yet described, which makes butterflies a small minority within their shared order.

Which author created The Very Hungry Caterpillar, the hole-punched picture book whose hero becomes a butterfly?

Eric Carle got the idea from playing with a hole punch in his studio; the 1969 book has since been translated into more than 70 languages.

Heimlich, a hungry caterpillar who finally sprouts tiny butterfly wings, appears in which animated film?

A Bug's Life gave the part to Pixar's Joe Ranft after director John Lasseter's wife heard him voice the caterpillar on a scratch track.

Which actor voiced Absolem, the caterpillar who returns as a butterfly in Tim Burton's 2010 film Alice in Wonderland?

Alan Rickman voiced Absolem, who ends the film in his new butterfly form, landing on Alice's shoulder as she prepares to set off on a trading ship.

Which singer's 1997 album Butterfly produced the US chart-topping lead single Honey?

Mariah Carey released Butterfly as her sixth studio album and co-wrote its lead single with Sean 'Puffy' Combs.

Which rapper's 2015 album To Pimp a Butterfly won the Grammy for Best Rap Album?

Kendrick Lamar's album was also nominated for Album of the Year at the 2016 Grammys but lost that prize to Taylor Swift's 1989.

Which composer saw the play Madame Butterfly in London and premiered his opera version at La Scala in 1904?

Giacomo Puccini saw that premiere flop, partly because he had finished the score too late for proper rehearsals; he went on to revise the opera into five versions.

Before the butterfly effect got its name, meteorologist Edward Lorenz pictured which bird's wings causing a storm?

Seagull was Lorenz's first image; by 1972 he had been persuaded that a butterfly setting off a tornado sounded more poetic, and the name stuck.

In which author's story A Sound of Thunder does a time-traveling hunter change history by crushing a butterfly?

Ray Bradbury sends a hunter named Eckels on a Tyrannosaurus safari; one dead butterfly on his boot rewrites the present he returns to.

In which 2015 video game does student Max Caulfield photograph a butterfly, then discover she can rewind time?

Life Is Strange builds its plot on the butterfly effect, and that first photo returns in the finale as the key to Max's last and hardest choice.

Which actor starred opposite Dustin Hoffman as Papillon, a safecracker with a butterfly tattoo, in a 1973 prison film?

Steve McQueen insisted on performing the film's famous cliff jump himself; the title is simply the French word for butterfly.

Which of these British day-fliers, whose caterpillars strip ragwort, is a moth and not a butterfly?

Cinnabar is the moth, named after a red mineral for the red patches on its black wings; its caterpillars soak up bitter toxins from ragwort that make them foul to eat.

Three of these North American insects are moths of the family Saturniidae; which one is a butterfly?

Buckeye is the only butterfly of the four. Its caterpillars load up on bitter compounds from plantain, which makes them a poor meal for ants and birds.

The sunset moth, so colorful that it was first described as a butterfly, lives on which island alone?

Madagascar is its only home. The first specimen to reach Europe had the head of another insect attached, probably a butterfly's, which helped fool the man who named it in 1773.

Which insect became a textbook case of natural selection when its dark form spread across sooty industrial England?

Peppered moth populations in industrial cities turned almost wholly dark by the 1890s, then swung back to the pale form once clean-air laws cut the soot.

Which moth squeaks when alarmed and slips into beehives to steal honey?

Death's-head hawkmoth squeaks may copy a piping call that honeybee workers obey by keeping still, which is one idea for how it gets away with raiding hives.

Darwin predicted that a moth with a foot-long tongue must exist after examining which kind of flower?

Orchid spurs up to 35 centimeters deep convinced him in 1862. Wallace added that the pollinator would be a sphinx moth, and the long-tongued one found later was named 'praedicta', the predicted one.

Male moths of the genus Calyptra can pierce the hide of large animals with a barbed tongue to drink what?

Blood is the meal, which earns them the name vampire moths; the habit probably grew out of piercing fruit for juice, and only the males do it.

The polyphemus moth is named after a one-eyed giant who traps the hero of which ancient epic?

The Odyssey has Odysseus blind the Cyclops Polyphemus to escape his cave; the moth earns the name with one large purplish spot on each hindwing.

Clothes moth caterpillars ruin wool sweaters because they can digest which tough protein?

Keratin is the protein in wool, and only the caterpillars can digest it; the adult moths seen fluttering around a wardrobe do no chewing at all.

A butterfly caterpillar clings to stems with stubby, fleshy false limbs ringed with tiny hooks; what are they called?

Prolegs are extras that grow from the abdomen: only the three pairs of jointed legs just behind the head count as true legs.