Butterflies!

 

It’s such a treat to have butterflies, fluttering around, making your garden a lovely space. These winged ones are a treat to watch and observe. They come in all types, literally, from a butterfly that camouflages like a dead leaf to one that has endless colors! And speaking of colors, one can be as brown as mud or as beautiful as the color wheel! These fragile creatures are a big help to the environment in pollination and other big jobs! They eat nectar and liquid from rotting fruit. They are also prey to small animals and birds.  And most of them do not have a lifespan longer than a year. Needless to say, they do all sorts of things!

Their birth process is fascinating, its known as metamorphosis and includes 4 stages which are, egg, larvae, pupa or chrysalis and finally an adult. This whole process is what turns a fat caterpillar to a butterfly. Their eggs are stuck by the one who laid it, with a sticky glue kind of liquid which prevents the egg to fall down. Then after it hatches it eats and eats and collects enough nutrients to undergo the next stage, the pupa. The caterpillar hangs down a branch with a sticky liquid and wraps itself in it and after some weeks, turns into a butterfly.

Butterflies live on an all liquid diet. they eat only liquids and no solids, and they taste from their feet. Butterflies should be warmed up to a certain temperature or else they can’t fly. Needless to say, they can’t fly while they are cold. They also help by putting the pollen on the flower, into the pistil of the flower, while they are drinking nectar from the flower, the pollen on the anther gets stuck on its feet, then it drops into a tube which is known as the style and helps in converting a flower into a fruit.

Some of the common predators of butterflies include: wasps, birds, parasite flies, ants, snakes, toads, rats, lizards, dragonflies and even monkeys! A few of the other animals that are constantly adding butterflies onto their menu list are frogs and spiders. Butterflies are found near green pastures and are found in large variety.

There are 17500 recorded species of butterflies, which is a lot, they glue their egg to the leaves, they range in size from a tiny 1/8 inch to a huge almost 12 inches, but if they continue to disappear, it will stop the pollination process and put a break in the ecosystem’s flow.so I will continue write more blogs and on more interesting topics so stay tuned!    ·