Educational Science

Eastern Butterflies Reveal Their Midwestern Roots

There's an old adage that almost nobody who lives in New York is actually from New York. Now the same can be said about the East Coast and monarch butterflies. Researchers from Canada's University of Guelph discovered that almost 90 percent of the monarchs they sampled along the United States'...

Butterflies Evolved UV-vision to Help Find Mates

The evolution of vision in butterflies may have led to the wide range of patterns and wing colors present in nature. Naturalists had once hypothesized that wing-color mimicry, which allowed butterflies to resemble bad-tasting relatives, emerged as a defense mechanism to confuse predators such as birds. That same disguise was...

Monarch butterflies that migrate for long distances have evolved significantly bigger and longer wings than their cousins who just stay put, a new study finds. Such traits are known to enhance flight abilities in other migratory species, which could explain why the far-flying butterflies evolved such a wing design. Researchers...

Source of Shimmering Butterfly Wing Colors Revealed

The rich, shimmering colors of some butterfly wings are produced not by pigments, but by a special geometric formation of cells, a new study suggests. Researchers used an X-ray scattering technique to image the wings from two groups of butterflies – the lycaenid and papilionid families – in 3-D. They...

New Butterfly Discovered with Mustache Disguise

A mustache on a butterfly has tipped off curators at the Natural History Museum in London that a specimen in their collection for 90 years actually belongs to a new species. A curator found the disguised insect, initially collected from the dry Magdalena valleys of Colombia, among the 3 million...

Butterflies Remember Caterpillar Days

The metamorphoses that caterpillars undergo rank among the most radical transformations in the animal kingdom. So it's rather amazing that a butterfly or moth can remember things from its caterpillar days. Amazing, but true, a new study finds. The broadly held view of what happens during metamorphosis is that the...

Butterfly Effect Could Improve Security of Money

Scientists have reproduced the brilliant optical effect of tropical butterfly wings. The advance could lower bank fraud by leading to improved security in the printing of paper money. The butterfly effect could be used to encrypt information on money or other valuable items and reduce forgery. The shiny green patches...

Dances With Butterflies

NEW YORK — Four- and 5-year-old children from the Goddard Riverside Head Start program strapped on butterfly wings and fluttered (albeit with both feet on the ground) through a live exhibit while butterflies flapped around and perched on lucky visitors. Wide-eyes and giggles filled the vivarium — think big walk-in...

Monarch Butterflies Self-Medicate

Monarch butterflies use medicinal plants to treat their offspring for disease, before they even hatch, a new study finds. Monarch caterpillars feed on any of dozens of species of milkweed plants, including some species that contain high levels of a group of chemicals callled cardenolides. These chemicals do not harm...

What's the Biggest Butterfly?

The Queen Alexandra Birdwing (Ornithoptera alexandrae) is the largest living butterfly, with a wingspan that stretches almost a foot across. One the rarest butterflies in the world, it's found only in the rain forests of New Guinea. The females, which have a chocolate brown body and wings, boast a wingspan...