Butterfly Protections

     The different kinds of butterflies and their larvae in southeastern Pennsylvania alone have a variety of ways of protecting themselves.  Some of those protections include camouflage, bristles on caterpillars, bright colors, fake eyes and mimicry.  A field guide to butterflies and their larvae and the internet will offer more details, and identification, of each butterfly species. 
     Many kinds of caterpillars, including those of cabbage whites and the swallowtail clan, are mostly green, allowing them to blend into their leafy backgrounds.  There they are not easily seen by birds and other predators that would catch and eat them if they saw them.
     Several kinds of butterfly larvae, such as mourning cloaks, buckeyes and red admirals, have sharp bristles on their bodies.  And those spines sting when touched, which further protects the caterpillars.
     Monarch caterpillars and a few other kinds have bright colors and patterns on their bodies to warn would-be predators that they are not good to eat.  Monarch larvae have white, black and yellow bands over their upper parts along the lengths of their bodies.  If a creature grabs a monarch caterpillar with its mouth, it will not seize another one. 
     The caterpillars of spicebush and tiger swallowtail butterflies have fake eyes on the upper thoraxes of their green bodies that intimidate and frighten away predators that respond to those "eyes" as they would to those on snakes or some other fearsome creature.  So wonderfully developed is the mimicry of the "eyes" of a spicebush swallowtail larvae, that when I peer deeply into them I have the eerie feeling that those eyes are looking back at me.  Each one has a black "pupil", a yellow "lid" and a white spot in the black that resembles light reflected in the eye.  Those black spots are evolutionary miracles, perfected after eons of trial and error.   
     Adult buckeye, painted lady and wood nymph butterflies have fake eyes on their wings that help protect them.  Buckeyes have two "eyes" on each of four wings for a total of eight, like a giant spider?
     But viceroy butterflies and their caterpillars are the masters of mimicry among local butterfly species.  The larvae are brown and white, and slightly twisted, looking like bird droppings on leaves.  They probably are often overlooked by birds and other critters that would ingest them if they saw them as food.
     Adult viceroys have orange wings with black striping, almost exactly as monarch butterflies do.  Any animal that had the misfortune of tasting a monarch butterfly will leave a viceroy alone, too.  After many, many years of development in different ways, viceroys, by luck, happened on a look, that mimics the poisonous monarchs, which saved the lives of individual viceroys that had it and passed that characteristic along to their descendants to the present day.  Supposedly, only the viceroys that, by luck, looked like monarchs, survived predators long enough to reproduce.  What a wonderful piece of development for survival.
     Several kinds of butterflies and their larvae, after long periods of time, developed various ways to protect themselves from being eaten.  Those strategies for survival allowed some butterflies life long enough to reproduce, keeping their populations going, however changed they may become through time.