Butterflies are whimsical insects that just about everyone loves, even your Aunt Tilda, who loses her mind whenever she sees any insect. They come in a rainbow of colors and love to visit flowers in the spring and summer when our beautiful zinnias and wildflowers bloom. Watching them flutter gracefully from flower to flower is a great and peaceful experience. In this article, we will find out what caterpillars and butterflies prefer to eat. Prepare for a shock if you are unfamiliar with the darker side of the butterfly diet.
What Do Hungry Caterpillars Eat?
If you’ve ever read “The Hungry Caterpillar,” you have a good idea of what happens shortly after a caterpillar hatches; it goes on an adventure looking for things to eat. You probably won’t see a caterpillar eating muffins or ice cream in real life, but they eat tasty leaves.
Typically, the mother caterpillar lays her eggs on a tasty plant. When the eggs hatch, the babies won’t need to look far for their first meal because they are already standing on it. The caterpillar will spend most of its life as a larva in the bush, plant, or tree. There are many types of vegetation that caterpillars enjoy devouring, but it’s dependent on what species of caterpillar the plant is home to.
Caterpillars eat some comical things, but nothing like the Hungry Caterpillar in the book. Real caterpillars eat every part of a plant, including flowers and stems. One type also eats honeycombs in a bee hive. Then, some species eat bark, twigs, and grass. One species of caterpillar, the large blue butterfly caterpillar, eats ants! It even has a chemical that tells the ants to carry it back to their nest, where the caterpillar will consume the ant.
Many types of moth caterpillars eat hair. We all heard the stories of moths getting into clothes stored away and eating holes in them. They can also feed on feathers, fur, and dirty wool. Other caterpillars eat moss and lichen, like the Brussels lace caterpillar, which is also disguised as lichen. Silk moth caterpillars have no issues eating dead animals, such as owl pellets, guano, and other birds’ droppings. Also, just for the record, cannibal caterpillars exist.
What Do Butterflies Eat?
Unless they have visited a live butterfly exhibit, most people might be stumped if asked what butterflies eat. When we see butterflies, it is when they are gliding from breeze to breeze on a summer day, or it might be when your spring and summer flower garden begins to bloom during the extra long days that you might get an up-close and personal view of the butterfly as it rests on a newly bloomed flower. A butterfly’s life is short, with many only living for a week or two. Some butterflies can survive through winter so that they may see two springs, but that’s still a very short life. Few see what a butterfly eats when it is out in the wild.
A butterfly’s mouth is unlike ours, and they do not need teeth since they do not chew solid food up to be digested in their final form. They do have chewing mouth parts as caterpillars. Instead, butterflies come equipped with straw-like mouthparts called proboscis, designed to unroll and reach far down into a flower’s sweet nectar. A butterfly’s favorite food is overly ripe fruit that’s super sweet or nectar from flowers. Substitute nectar can be made from honey and water to offer your beautiful friends a snack. Setting up a butterfly watering and feeding station outside your window can be a fantastic experience. Since they are also in love with sweet treats, hummingbirds are also drawn to the same flowers that draw butterflies in with their intoxicating sugary aroma.
Butterflies seem to be busy flying around checking everything out in the short amount of time they are alive, unlike most animals that spend a good portion of their time searching for something to eat or drink. Butterflies do need water, and since it’s typically hot and humid when we are graced with their colorful presence, they might just be seeking a place to hydrate and take a break from the hot sun.
What a butterfly uses for nourishment depends on where the butterfly is native to. Certain plants are excellent nectar sources, while others might have “butterfly” in their name, but it may not be that great for them. The butterfly bush is one of those. They attract tons of butterflies, which may be fun to watch, but it isn’t much fun for them to compete with so many of their kind for nectar from the purple flowers.
Some Strange Things Butterflies Like to Eat
Butterflies feast on things that aren’t necessarily flowers or nectar. Butterflies are often spotted resting along the perimeter of a muddy puddle. They are taking minerals from the soil that will be given to the female butterflies to add to their egg production. This strange behavior may also be seen when butterflies are near blood, sweat, vomit, urine, feces, or tears. It’s safe to say that butterflies have a dark side that not everyone knows about.
Seeing a bunch of bluish-purple butterflies hovering around spilled blood from roadkill isn’t shocking. They are not vampires, gothic butterflies, or weird; they do what they need to survive and thrive. Blood, feces, urine, sweat, tears, vomit, and any other bodily fluid you can think of can be used by butterflies to aid in reproduction, combat dehydration, and provide essential minerals not found in the nectar of flowers.
Butterflies whimsically dance through the breeze. They are beautiful and mesmerizing splashes of color in our summer skies, but they have some cravings that cannot be fixed with flowers and nectar. Not everything a kitten does is cute and happy. It’s not the nature of nature to be G-rated all the time. Nature is raw and can be highly gritty. The thing that makes butterflies seem lighthearted, whimsical, and lovely can also make them seem gross, but it is their way of surviving. There’s nothing terrible about surviving.
