The Biggest Butterflies

Butterflies are indeed amazing creatures, whose beauty and delicacy have always impressed people.

They are found everywhere, from the Poles to the Equator, and their variety in size, models, colors and patterns is amazing.

Currently, the Lepidoptera Order, compassing butterflies and the so-called moths (they are in fact also butterflies), is made up of 260,000 described species and their real number could be even higher.

20,000 species are counted as big butterflies.

As in the case of many poikiloterm and warm-loving creatures, the highest variety is found in the tropics, where also the biggest species dwell.

But which is the biggest butterfly?

Well, you will see it if you travel to the rainforest of the eastern part of the big island of New Guinea, located north of Australia.

It is a species of birdwing: the Queen Alexandra butterfly (Ornithoptera alexandrae) (photo above), with a wingspan of 28 cm (12 inch).

This is more than the wingspan of many little birds.

Their body length is 8 cm (3.2 inch) and it weighs 12 g.

The species was named by L.W.Rotschild in 1907, in honor of Queen Alexandra, wife of King Edward VII of the United Kingdom.

The first specimen was found and caught in 1906 by Albert Stewart Meek.

Queen Alexandra's Birdwing protects itself with a poison which comes from a pipevine plant the animal eats during the caterpillar phase, while the adult only sucks vegetable liquids and nectar.

In tropical America, the biggest species is a swallowtail butterfly, Papilio homerus (photo center), with a wingspan of 15 cm (6 inch).

The biggest African butterfly is also a species of swallowtail, Papilio antimachus (photo below), whose wing opening reaches 23 cm (11.5 inch).

These are the biggest, but what about the smallest butterflies?

"The Illustrated Encyclopedia of Butterflies" by John Feltwell says that "the blue dwarf butterfly, Brephidium exilis (from North America)...is probably the smallest world's butterfly, with a wingspan of 1.5-1.9 cm (0.6-0.7inch)".

In Europe, the smallest butterfly is the blue Cupido minimus, with a wingspan of 2.4 cm (1 inch).