Butterfly Fun Facts Butterflies range in size from a tiny 3 mm to a huge almost 30 cm. 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 19 km per hour. Some moths can fly about 40 km/h! The Sphinx Moth has been clocked at about 60 kph.  Many of these same moths are also capable of hovering in the air like a helicopter. Butterflies cannot fly if their body temperature is less than about 25 degrees C. 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 over 30 cm long to get the nectar from the bottom of a 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. They do this to find out whether the leaf they sit on is suitable as a food source for their caterpillars. If so, they can lay their eggs. Millions of shingle-like, overlapping scales give butterfly and moths wings their colors. The colour is produced by the bending of light over the scales, not by pigmentation. During the time from hatching to pupation, a caterpillar increases its body size more than 30,000 times. The chrysalises of some butterflies are capable of producing weak sounds to scare off potetial enemies.  They do this by flexing and rubbing together body segment membranes. In some moths the wings are mostly transparent. The silkworm, Bombix mori, is the only truly domesticated insect. The adult moths are so tame they can barely fly and they must be hand fed. The vampire moth of Asia has a stiff proboscis that enables them to suck juices from thick-skinned fruits, but occasionally they can be found sucking the blood from a water buffalo or deer. Many caterpillars are covered with stinging (urticating) hairs which carry a toxin that can be quite painful to humans if touched. It takes about ten pounds of mulberry leaves for silkworms to be able to manufacture 1 pound of cocoons, which can be spun into a silk thread over 100 miles long. The wings of some butterflies and moths are marked with patterns that look very much like letters and numbers. Adult butterflies feed on the nectar of flowers, but may also be seen feeding on rotting fruit, tree sap, fluids from animal carcasses, and mud puddles. The yucca plant and the yucca moth are totally dependent upon one another for their existence - a relationship known as mutualism. Monarch butterflies regularly migrate between southern Canada and central Mexico, a total distance in excess of 2500 miles.  They only weigh 1/50 of an ounce yet travel at 20 mph and reach altitudes of 10,000 feet. Members of the silkworm moth family have been raised in China since 2697 BC, where the methods are silk production had been a closely guarded secret. Anyone caught removing these insects from China was executed!  However, in 55 AD two monks managed to hide some silkworm moths in their walking canes and smuggle them to Constantinople. "Puddle clubs" are groups of butterflies (usually males) that gather around mud puddles and other moist areas of soil to suck up salts and other minerals dissolved in water.