Scientists lay out what we do and don’t yet know about moths and butterflies
- Scientists have published a broad review of what they’ve learned about moths and butterflies over the last few decades.
- Special attention is given to pivotal moments during the ~300 million-year history of the group. These include changes in diet that moths achieved, in part, by purloining genetic material from bacteria and fungi; the evolution of the proboscis and early forms of pollination; the origin of flowers and the first butterflies; the origin of bats and the strategies moths used to evade them; and the alarming decline of moth and butterfly diversity caused by human activity.
- Many new discoveries have been made by studying genomes, aided by large scientific initiatives like Project Psyche, which is in the process of sequencing the genomes of all moth and butterfly species in Europe, and the overarching Earth Biogenome Project with its ambitious goal to sequence all 1.8 million known eukaryotic species on Earth.
Should you ever find yourself playing a trivia game on the topic of moths and butterflies, here are a few facts that might help. Collectively called Lepidoptera, moths and butterflies account for nearly 10% of all animal species.
In some environments, caterpillars consume more living leaves than all other animals in that environment put together. In about 10% of Lepidopterans, this process of bulking up during the larval stage is critical because the adults lack functioning mouthparts and die when their reserves run out.
Other species are prolific feeders. There are moths and butterflies that drink nectar, sap, urine, blood, sweat, tears, mucous, pus, moist feces and the emulsions of rotting fruit and animal flesh. Some species can even eat pollen, despite not having a jaw, by using their proboscis like an elephant trunk to scoop up samples from multiple flowers, coat them in external digestive juices and slurp up the resulting polyglot slop of liquified pollen grains.
Actually, about 2% of Lepidopterans — in a group called non-ditrysians — do have jaws. They’re weird and have several additional physical features and behaviors that distinguish them from other Lepidoptera.
This is just a smattering of what humans have learned about moths and butterflies during our long, shared history, and we’re learning more all the time. In fact, discoveries are now being made so frequently that it’s even hard for scientists to keep up.
Researchers at the Florida Museum of Natural History, the Wellcome Sanger Institute, the University of Montpellier, the University of York, Harvard University and Lund University recently condensed what we do and don’t yet know about moths and butterflies in a convenient review article, published in the journal Nature Reviews Biodiversity.
“Even though moths and butterflies are a well-studied group, we’re just now beginning to understand some of the most basic facts about their evolution and conservation needs,” said senior author Akito Kawahara, a curator at the Florida Museum’s McGuire Center for Lepidoptera and Biodiversity. “There’s still so much more to do.”