A Great Mormon basks on top of a Paper Kite next to this Emerald Swallowtail from Southeast Asia. This info from AMNH: The emerald swallowtail (Papilio palinurus) is sometimes called a banded peacock, but it might just as easily be called a chameleon. Like the shade-shifting lizard, the emerald swallowtail changes color depending on the angle of the light, and it has a strikingly disparate appearance from one side to the other. The bright bands on the butterfly’s generally dark green upper side aren’t caused by pigments but by the surface of unique microstructures in the scales on its wings ..read more

This is a microscopic photo of a butterfly egg. Most butterflies deposit a cluster of tiny eggs, sometimes hundreds of them, on the underside of a leaf, fastening them there with a glue-like substance. The leaves provide protection—and later, food—for the young caterpillars. Filmmaker Louie Schwartzberg reveals spectacular natural beauty imperceptible to the human eye. See more here: Hidden miracles of the natural world, a film by Louie Schwartzberg ..read more

Long before the famous Campbell’s Soup can paintings, Andy Warhol worked as a commercial illustrator and excelled at creating fresh, whimsical textile prints at a time when a post-war generation wanted new ideas for ready-to-wear clothes. To read the full article from the magazine, Modern Daily Knitting, Click here ..read more

They resemble each other but come from the other side of the globe: A White Peacock from North, Central and South America and a Grey Pansy from Southeast Asia ..read more

The category: Wings. The contestant got it right ..read more

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March 14th is National Learn About Butterflies Day. For the past several years I have posted an interesting fact on Facebook. The responses have been appreciative and grateful! 2024. Today is National Learn About Butterflies Day. Did you know… You can tell if the Monarch is a male by the little black dots on its wings. Monarch males can produce pheromones, which they secrete through special glands on the wings. 2023. Today is National Learn About Butterflies Day. Did you know… Birds are natural predators who eat butterflies and caterpillars? However, sometimes they just coexist in lovely ima ..read more

Apparently Swallowtail butterflies are known to lay their eggs in the Vivarium. They confuse these plants with their host plants ..read more

This article is from The Smithsonian Magazine. Here are excerpts: Akito Kawahara has spent his life devoted to lepidoptera. Now he’s correcting the record on where they first evolved Most scientists thought they evolved in Australasia, but it seems most likely that the first butterflies appeared in North and Central America. The ancestor of butterflies was a nocturnal moth that became day-flying here, 101.4 million years ago. Processing more than 370 million individual DNA pieces, or nucleotides, through models of DNA evolution, the supercomputers calculated the best hypothesis or probability ..read more

AMNH Butterfly Vivarium: new sign about exiting and keeping the butterflies safe. IMHO it is challenging to read and understand ..read more