They drink from mud puddles

A BUTTERFLY cannot live on sugar alone; it needs minerals, too. To supplement its diet of nectar, a butterfly will occasionally sip from mud puddles, which are rich in minerals and salts. This behaviour is called ‘puddling’.

WITHIN about 10-12 feet, butterfly eyesight is quite good. Anything beyond that distance gets a little blurry to a butterfly, though. Butterflies rely on their eyesight for vital tasks, like finding flowers and their own kind. Butterflies can see a range of ultraviolet colours invisible to the human eye. n

BUTTERFLIES have the most colourful, vibrant wings but they are actually transparent and are formed by layers of chitin, the protein that makes up an insect’s exoskeleton. These layers are so thin you can see right through them. Thousands of tiny scales cover the transparent chitin, and these scales reflect light in different colours. As butterfly ages, scales fall off the wings, leaving spots of transparency where the chitin layer is exposed.

LIFESPAN depends on the size, the species, where it lives, and what time of year it became an adult. For example, if the butterfly is of the smaller kind it will probably not live as long, but if it is a larger butterfly, it will live longer. It is not the only factor, but does attribute to it. An average life span of a butterfly is usually about one month; the smallest butterflies will live about one week. ‘Mourning Cloaks’, some tropical ‘Heliconians’, and ‘Monarchs’ are some of the only butterflies that have an average life span of about nine months.