Butterflies, who are they?

           Every person on earth knows that butterfly is the unique, beautiful, delicate, flying creature who drinks nectar from flowers. But the butterfly is one of the most diverse group of organisms who shows a great amount of diversity from simply the colouration to everything else it does.

        Taxonomic data gives us the information, where does it belong in the tree of life.

Kingdom: Animalia

Phylum: Arthropoda

Class: Insecta

Order: Lepidoptera

Superfamily: Papilionoidea

        "Butterflies are distributed worldwide except Antarctica, totalling some 18,500 species. Of these, 775 are Nearctic; 7,700 Neotropical; 1,575 Palearctic; 3,650 Afrotropical; and 4,800 are distributed across the combined Oriental and Australian/Oceania regions."
                                                                                                                  -Wikipedia

          Some morphological characters of adult butterflies,

• They have scaled wings and body. (Moths and butterflies both share this character)
• They have two pairs of wings, which means in total they have four wings.
• They have bodies comprising of three tagmata; a head, a thorax and an abdomen.
• They have a pair of antenna on their heads.
• They have a proboscis to take food.
• They have three pairs of legs. (six legs)   

          The colourful flying insect who we call butterfly, has a life cycle. Only the last phase of it is the flying butterfly. 

           Egg to Larva, Larva to Pupa, Pupa to Imago (or the butterfly we image). Butterflies lay their eggs in unique patterns and places and most importantly on specific plants (Though there are some larvae who feed on living tissue). Butterflies have specific host plants on which they lay eggs. And the emerging larvae (or in common tongue caterpillars) eat the host plant and grow molting several times as they grow bigger in size. At some point they stop eating and pupate. They make a pupa and go into an inactive phase. in the pupal stage, the morphological features of the caterpillar disappear and the imago or the adult butterfly is slowly grow inside. When this process is complete it leaves the pupa, come out, spread its wings and fly away starting the cycle again.    

Life history of Common Leopard