Butterfly
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50 free Butterfly trivia questions with answers — nature quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
13 free Butterfly trivia questions with answers. Butterfly trivia lives in two places on BrainPickle. This page is the shorter set; the main quiz is Butterflies trivia, with our deepest question pool on the topic and a source behind every answer.
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Q 01Which sequence lists the stages of a butterfly's life cycle in order?
Egg, larva, pupa, adult
Egg, larva, pupa, adult: the freshly emerged adult is damp and crumpled, and must pump blood into its wings and let them dry before it can fly; after that it never grows again.
Q 02Which tropical American butterfly owes its shimmer to wing ridges, not pigment?
Morpho
Morpho wings hold no blue pigment: stacked microscopic ridges send back blue wavelengths, and only on the upper side; underneath, the same wings are dull brown with eyespots.
Q 03What is the name of the straw-like mouthpart that adult butterflies use for feeding?
Proboscis
Proboscis: it starts as two separate half-tubes that the newly emerged butterfly has to join together, and since it can only suck, the adult lives entirely on liquids.
Q 04Kallima butterflies of tropical Asia hide in plain sight because the undersides of their wings resemble what?
A dead leaf
A dead leaf: the undersides show dark veins like a leaf's, and individuals vary in colour and blotches as real leaves do, a variety traced in 2022 to a single wing-pattern gene.
Q 05What is the pupal stage of a butterfly specifically called?
Chrysalis
Chrysalis comes from the Greek khrysos, gold, after the metallic golden sheen on the pupae of some butterflies; most moths instead hide the pupa inside a spun silk cocoon.
Q 06What tiny structures cover a butterfly's wings, giving them their color and patterns?
Scales
Scales give the wings their colours and patterns, and they are so distinctive that the whole order of butterflies and moths is named for them: Lepidoptera is Greek for 'scale wing'.
Q 07What primary sensory function do a butterfly's antennae perform?
Smelling
Smelling: antennae are often called 'feelers', but they do more than touch; they are the insect's nose, picking up scents drifting on the air.
Q 08Adult butterflies take only liquids; besides nectar, which of these plant fluids do some sip for nourishment?
Tree sap
Tree sap and aphid honeydew are the main fare of Britain's purple emperor, a treetop butterfly that also comes down to probe dung and carrion for salts.
Q 09What happens to most of a caterpillar's tissues while it is transforming into a butterfly?
Broken down and rebuilt
Broken down and rebuilt: the caterpillar releases enzymes that digest much of its own body into a kind of soup, and small clusters of surviving cells grow into the adult's eyes and wings.
Q 10Which European butterfly scares off birds with a sudden wing flash and a hissing sound?
The peacock
The peacock lives by bluff: in tests, blue tits killed almost none of the butterflies whose eyespots were intact but most of those with the spots painted out, though it is perfectly edible.
Q 11How do most butterflies hold their wings when resting, a quick way to tell them from most moths?
Closed upright over the back
Closed upright over the back is the rule, though it is broken both ways: some skippers rest with their wings flat, while geometrid moths often hold theirs up like a butterfly.
Q 12A butterfly's body has three sections; which one carries all six legs and both pairs of wings?
Thorax
Thorax: this middle section is packed with the flight muscles, and a butterfly can also move its wings simply by changing the shape of the thorax itself.
Q 13Besides providing colour, what other function does the covering on a butterfly's wings serve?
Insulation
Q 21What is it called when a harmless butterfly imitates a distasteful species to borrow its protection?
Batesian mimicry
Batesian mimicry is named for Henry Walter Bates, who described it from butterflies in the Amazon rainforest; it works best while the harmless copies stay scarcer than the distasteful species they imitate.
Q 22Unlike mammals, most butterflies use which sex-chromosome system?
ZW females, ZZ males
ZW females, ZZ males: the female has the unlike pair, the mirror image of our XY system; birds use the same arrangement, so in both it is the egg, not the sperm, that fixes the sex.
Q 23The word 'butterfly' descends from a compound word in which language?
Old English
Insulation: the wing covering helps the butterfly hold on to body heat, and because it comes away so easily it is also widely believed to help the insect slip free of a spider's web.
Q 14Butterflies belong to which superfamily of the order Lepidoptera?
Papilionoidea
Papilionoidea: phylogenetic work placed the skippers (Hesperiidae) and the moth-butterflies (Hedylidae) inside the superfamily too, making it equivalent to the traditional grouping Rhopalocera.
Q 15What do butterflies mainly use the sense organs on their feet for?
Tasting
Tasting: a butterfly samples a plant just by standing on it, and a female swallowtail drums a leaf with her forelegs to check it is the right kind before laying an egg.
Q 16Roughly how many butterfly species are there worldwide?
About 18,500
About 18,500 butterfly species are known, yet they are a small minority of their order: moths make up most of the 160,000 or more described species of Lepidoptera.
Q 17The large blue butterfly's caterpillar lives inside the nests of which insects?
Ants
Ants: the caterpillar is adopted into a red ant nest and feeds on the brood; the large blue died out in Britain in 1979 and was brought back only once it was clear which ant it needs.
Q 18A 2023 DNA study found the first butterflies' caterpillars probably fed on which plant family?
Pea family
Pea family, the legumes: the same DNA work dates the first butterflies to about 100 million years ago, when a line of night-flying moths took to the day in what is now the Americas.
Q 19In most butterfly families, what shape are the antennae?
Clubbed
Clubbed antennae are the quickest way to tell a butterfly from a moth, though not a perfect one: the day-flying sun moths have clubbed antennae too and are often mistaken for butterflies.
Q 20In many butterfly species, mud-puddling is restricted to which individuals?
Males
Males: usually only they puddle, and the sodium is thought to be passed to the female at mating as a nuptial gift; in one test, salt-fed males courted harder and mated more often.
Old English: the OED's earliest form is butorflēoge, from butor (butter) and flēoge (fly); one theory links the name to the bright yellow male brimstone, and modern Dutch and German use unrelated words.
Q 24The world's largest butterfly, Queen Alexandra's birdwing, is restricted to forests in which country?
Papua New Guinea
Papua New Guinea: the birdwing survives in just two pockets of rainforest in Oro Province, hemmed in by oil palm; the 1951 eruption of Mount Lamington may also have wiped out part of its range.
Q 25The Homerus swallowtail, the Americas' largest butterfly, survives only in the Blue Mountains and Cockpit Country of which Caribbean island?
Jamaica
Jamaica: the swallowtail once lived in seven of the island's 14 parishes, but a 2017 review found only two strongholds left, and trade in it is banned under CITES Appendix I.
Q 26Queen Alexandra's birdwing flies so high that the first specimen, in 1906, was collected how?
Shot down
Shot down: the collector Albert Meek brought the first female down with a gun, and the specimen still shows the holes; his patron Walter Rothschild named the species the next year.
Q 27The hedylids, moth-like butterflies of tropical America, fly mostly at night and have ears tuned to which hunters?
Bats
Bats: hedylids carry ultrasound-sensitive hearing organs that pick up a hunting bat's calls, and DNA suggests their ancestors flew by day and took to the night early in the family's history.
Q 28The monarch belongs to which butterfly family?
Brush-footed butterflies
Brush-footed butterflies, the Nymphalidae, keep their tiny front legs curled up against the body, so a monarch appears to stand on only four legs.
Q 29Which smaller monarch mimic has an extra black stripe across each hindwing?
The viceroy
The viceroy (Limenitis archippus) is smaller than the monarch and carries a black line across each hindwing; both are distasteful, so each reinforces the other's warning to predators.
Q 30Which heart poisons do monarch butterflies store from their food plants to deter predators?
Cardenolides
Cardenolides protect most monarchs, yet at the winter roosts black-backed orioles and black-headed grosbeaks eat millions of them a year; the grosbeak is largely insensitive to the poison.