The vision of butterflies appears to be excellent, especially within short distances. They are able to fly with precision in areas of many obstacles. Mating Behavior. Females are usually able to engage in mating on the day of emergence, but males do not normally mate for several days.
Courtship rituals vary widely among species. Butterflies are currently, with some arguments, placed into the following six families:. Known as "Skippers," containing relatively small, fast-flying species.
About 3, worldwide species. Blues, Hairstreaks and Coppers. Colors and patterns of sexes often differ. Over 5, world species. Known as "Brush-footed" butterflies, contains many subfamilies. There are some 5, worldwide species. Known as "Swallowtail, butterflies, most species have prominent "tails. Known as "Yellows and Whites, they have those colors predominantly. More than 1, worldwide species. Known as metalmarks, are sometimes placed in the Family Lycaenidae.
About 1, species in the world. The Lepidoptera Collection of the Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History has over 4 million specimens—including butterflies, moths, and skippers.
BugInfo Butterflies. They will then mate by joining together end to end at their abdomens. During the mating process, when their bodies are joined, the male passes sperm to the female. As the eggs later pass through the female's egg-laying tube, they are fertilized by the sperm. The male butterfly often dies soon after mating. After mating with a male, the female butterfly must go in search of a plant on which to lay her eggs.
Because the caterpillars that will hatch from her eggs will be very particular about what they eat, she must be very particular in choosing a plant. She can recognize the right plant species by its leaf color and shape. Just to be sure, however, she may beat on the leaf with her feet. This scratches the leaf surface, causing a characteristic plant odor to be released. Once she is sure she has found the correct plant species, she will go about the business of egg-laying.
While laying her eggs, they are fertilized with the sperm that has been stored in her body since mating. Some butterflies lay a single egg, while others may lay their eggs in clusters. A sticky substance produced by the female enables the eggs to stick where ever she lays them, either on the underside of a leaf or on a stem.
Butterflies are cold-blooded and cannot withstand winter conditions in an active state. Butterflies may survive cold weather by hibernating in protected locations. They may use the peeling bark of trees, perennial plants, logs or old fences as their overwintering sites. They may hibernate at any stage egg, larval, pupal or adult but generally each species is dormant in only one stage.
Another way that butterflies can escape cold weather is by migrating to a warmer region. Some migrating butterflies, such as the painted lady and cabbage butterfly, fly only a few hundred miles, while others, such as the monarch, travel thousands of miles.
Monarchs are considered the long-distance champions of butterfly migration, traveling as many as miles round trip. They begin their flight before the autumn cold sets in, heading south from Canada and the northern United States. Monarchs migrate to the warmer climates of California, Florida and Mexico, making the trip in two months or less and feeding on nectar along the way. Once arriving at their southern destination, they will spend the winter resting for the return flight.
Few of the original adults actually complete the trip home. Instead, the females mate and lay eggs along the way and their offspring finish this incredible journey. Butterflies and caterpillars are preyed upon by birds, spiders, lizards and various other animals.
Largely defenseless against many of these hungry predators, Lepidoptera have developed a number of passive ways to protect themselves. One way is by making themselves inconspicuous through the use of camouflage. Caterpillars may be protectively colored or have structures that allow them to seemingly disappear into the background.
For example, many caterpillars are green, making them difficult to detect because they blend in with the host leaf. Some larvae, particularly those in the Tropics, bear a resemblance to bird droppings, a disguise that makes them unappealing to would-be predators. The coloration and pattern of a butterfly's wings may enable it to blend into its surrounding. Some may look like dead leaves on a twig when they are at rest with their wings closed. The under wing markings of the comma and question mark butterflies help them to go unnoticed when hibernating in leaf litter.
Back to index Butterfly Words Glossary. Abdomen noun - the last segment of an insect's body, located at the tail end. The heart, reproductive organs and much of the digestive system are located in an insect's abdomen. Adult noun - the fully grown or fully developed stage of an animal. A butterfly or moth is the adult stage of a caterpillar. Antenna noun, plural: antennae - one of a pair of slender structures located on the head of some insects.
Butterfly antennae are used for balance and for detecting smells and wind speed. Basking verb - the activity where a butterfly rests with outstretched wings in the sunshine in order to absorb as much heat as possible. Camouflage noun - a protective coloring that enables an animal to blend in with its environment, thus hiding it from its predators. Caterpillar noun - the worm-like second stage in a butterfly life cycle, also called a larva.
Chitin noun, pronounced: KI-tin - a tough, colorless material that makes up the insect exoskeleton. Chrysalis noun - pronounced: KRIS-uh-liss - the third stage of the butterfly life cycle, also called a pupa. Cocoon noun - the silken protective covering made by a moth larva before it becomes a pupa.
Cold blooded adjective - having a body temperature that is about the same as the surrounding air because of the animal's inability to regulate its own internal body heat.
On the other hand, warm blooded animals are able to regulate their own internal body heat and their bodies stay at a fairly constant temperature, regardless of their surroundings. Dormancy noun - a period of no activity when development is suspended, often occurring during unfavorable conditions. Also, dormant verb. Egg noun - the first stage in a butterfly's life cycle. Because wing development in fruit flies and butterflies is very similar, the initial stages of wing development, such as creation of compartments in butterfly wings, has come to be understood quite well through the study of fruit flies.
However, butterflies are different from flies in that butterflies have intricate and colorful wing patterns. Researchers have been quite successful at identifying numerous genes that create these patterns. For example, many genes involved in the development of patterns that look like eyes, called eyespot patterns, have been identified. In the butterfly species Bicyclus anynana , genes called spalt and distal-less are expressed in the centers of eyespots, and, spalt is also expressed in the black ring.
So, based on these studies and the similarity in development between fly and butterfly wings, we hypothesized that a gene called apterous A might be responsible for creating different dorsal and ventral wing patterns in butterflies. We selected this gene because, in the wings of flies and butterflies, it is expressed only on the dorsal surface and is absent from the ventral surface [ 3 , 4 ].
We used the butterfly B. To show that this gene is responsible for creating different surface-specific patterns in butterflies, we needed to delete it and look at wing patterns in butterflies that did not have this gene.
If apterous A is indeed responsible for creating a dorsal pattern that is different from the ventral pattern, then when it is deleted, the dorsal pattern should become similar to the ventral pattern. The CRISPR-Cas9 technique is a powerful new technology that has made it possible for scientists to easily mutate genes and delete gene functions [ 5 ]. This system was initially identified in bacteria as an immune response to protect bacteria from harmful agents such as viruses [ 5 ].
When scientists use the CRISPR-Cas9 technique to delete certain genes in animals, they can then study the animals to see what happens when that gene is missing. The RNA sequence tells the scissors which gene to chop up, and the Cas9 scissors cut it. However, repair mechanisms are quite poor and, when the chopped region is being repaired; lots of sequences either get deleted or added, destroying the function of that gene Figure 2.
To use this system in B. We then raised all the emerging caterpillars until they became adults, and then studied the butterfly wing patterns to see if the dorsal patterns now looked like ventral patterns. The mutant patterns are usually mosaic occur as patches on the wing surface because only some cells but not all the cells of the butterfly would have been targeted by the scissors when we injected them into the eggs Figure 2.
We can then confirm that the correct gene has been mutated by looking at the DNA of those butterflies to see whether the apterous A gene sequence has been changed. We found that, when apterous A was deleted from these butterflies, the butterflies had mosaic, ventral-like patterns on the dorsal surface of their wings Figure 3 [ 6 ]. In the males for instance, certain features such as a gland used for producing courtship perfumes, which is normally located on the ventral surface, now appeared on the dorsal surface red arrow in Figure 3 , column 2.
Ninety percent of the world species occur in Latin America. They are small butterflies, often rust-colored, and only two species are found in the eastern U. Ehrlich, P. How to Know the Butterflies. Brown, Dubuque, Iowa.
Howe, W. The Butterflies of North America. Doubleday, New York. Miller, L. Memoirs of the Lepidopterists' Society 2: Miller, J. The common names of North American Butterflies.
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