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Looking for some Fun Facts about butterflies? We can help - we have LOTS of Fun articles to help you:
Fun Butterfly Facts:
We have gathered some strange butterfly facts to
share with you. Amaze your friends! Enjoy!
- Butterflies range in size from a tiny 1/8 inch
to a huge almost 12 inches.
- Butterflies can see red, green, and yellow.
- Some people say that when the black bands on the
Woolybear caterpillar are wide, a cold winter is
coming.
- The top butterfly flight speed is 12 miles per
hour. Some moths can fly 25 miles per hour!
- Monarch butterflies journey from the Great Lakes
to the Gulf of Mexico, a distance of about 2,000
miles, and return to the north again in the
spring.
- Butterflies cannot fly if their body temperature
is less than 86 degrees.
- Representations of butterflies are seen in
Egyptian frescoes at Thebes, which are 3,500 years
old.
- Antarctica is the only continent on which no
Lepidoptera have been found.
- There are about 24,000 species of butterflies.
The moths are even more numerous: about 140,000
species of them were counted all over the world.
- The Brimstone butterfly (Gonepterix rhamni) has
the longest lifetime of the adult butterflies:
9-10 months.
- Some Case Moth caterpillars (Psychidae) build a
case around themselves that they always carry with
them. It is made of silk and pieces of plants or
soil.
- The caterpillars of some Snout Moths (Pyralididae)
live in or on water-plants.
- The females of some moth species lack wings, all
they can do to move is crawl.
- The Morgan's Sphinx Moth from Madagascar has a
proboscis (tube mouth) that is 12 to 14 inches
long to get the nectar from the bottom of a 12
inch deep orchid discovered by Charles Darwin.
- Some moths never eat anything as adults because
they don't have mouths. They must live on the
energy they stored as caterpillars.
- Many butterflies can taste with their feet to
find out whether the leaf they sit on is good to
lay eggs on to be their caterpillars' food or not.
- There are more types of insects in one tropical
rain forest tree than there are in the entire
state of Vermont.
- In 1958 Entomologist W.G. Bruce published a list
of Arthropod references in the Bible. The most
frequently named bugs from the Bible are: Locust:
24, Moth: 11, Grasshopper: 10, Scorpion: 10,
Caterpillar: 9, and Bee: 4.
- People eat insects – called "Entomophagy"(people
eating bugs) – it has been practiced for
centuries throughout Africa, Australia, Asia, the
Middle East, and North, Central and South America.
Why? Because many bugs are both protein-rich and
good sources of vitamins, minerals and fats.
- YOU can eat bugs! Try the "Eat-A-Bug
Cookbook" by David George Gordon , 10 Speed
Press. Don’t want to cook them yourself? Go to
HotLix
for all sorts of insect goodies! My favorites are
"Cricket-lickit’s" – a flavored
sucker with a real edible cricket inside.
- Many
insects can carry 50 times their own body weight.
This would be like an adult person lifting two
heavy cars full of people.
- There are over a million described species of
insects. Some people estimate there are actually
between 15 and 30 million species.
- Most insects are beneficial to people because
they eat other insects, pollinate crops, are food
for other animals, make products we use (like
honey and silk) or have medical uses.
- Butterflies and insects have their skeletons on
the outside of their bodies, called the
exoskeleton. This protects the insect and keeps
water inside their bodies so they don’t dry out.
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