When you think about insects, you think of insects like mosquitoes and beetles. But what most people look over are the beautiful insects in our world, like butterflies. Butterflies are commonly looked over insects that we never truly appreciate.

Butterflies are very unique insects and people don’t know much about them. Some fun facts about butterflies are that they normally taste things with their feet. Most of the time, when they taste stuff with their feet, they’re trying to find the best plants to lay their eggs. Butterflies use their tarsi (legs) as soon as they land on a plant to taste if they want to use the plant or not.

Another fun fact about butterflies is that their wings are actually transparent! The wings of butterflies are made of chitin, a clear protein. What makes butterflies’ wings appear colorful is pigmented scales. There are thousands of tiny, microscopic scales that cover up the membrane of the wings. However, over time these scales can lose their pigmentation and start to show the transparent wings again.

Not only are there a bunch of interesting facts about butterflies but also, unique types of butterflies! From what we know now, there are up to 20,000 different types of butterflies! These butterflies range in all different types of temperatures and areas, although there are some hotspots where butterflies are commonly found in. An example of this is neotropic (a hotspot surrounded by South America, Central America, and Caribbean, and southern Mexico/Florida). Neotropic is known for holding over 7,700 different types of butterflies.

Insects are something that we push to the side in our lives and never truly take time to appreciate the diversity and complexity of some insects. Butterflies are amazing and beautiful creatures that we should take time to learn and understand.