How many butterflies live at different stages of their life cycle

Watching the fluttering bright moths, so airy and beautiful, you involuntarily think: how many butterflies live? I want such an unearthly miracle to be with us for a long time, illuminating our life with the thrill of its wings, which are colored with all the colors of the rainbow. But, alas, the life of these creatures is regrettably short, especially if we consider the butterfly the last stage of life of a moth - in fact, its maturity and old age.

The life expectancy of moths is affected by their species. After all, it is said about the sensation, which loses its relevance on the next day - "butterfly-one-day". However, the minimum period that nature takes for beauties with fluttering wings is still not a day, but 3-4 days. This is a kind of butterflies, which are called pigeons. In comparison with them, the monarch-danaid is a real long-loner - she lives at the stage of the winged creation from nine months to a year. Well, an ordinary resident of our latitudes, who inflicted so many losses on the gardens in her "childhood", like a caterpillar - a cabbage butterfly flutters for about two weeks.

If we decide how much the butterfly lives globally, that is, we take into account all stages of its life cycle, then we will get a very diverse picture. For example, a vanessa spends 3-4 days in an egg, in the caterpillar stage - from five to ten days (depending on how much she eats and accumulates fat to transform into a moth), sleeps in a dollie from a week to ten days, and turns into a Light-winged female only for two weeks. In this short time, the Vanessa must find a representative of the opposite sex, mate with him, form eggs in her body, put them back and die. Maybe that's why female moths live a few days longer than males - to have time to lay eggs?

Habitat, especially geographical latitude, plays an important role in how many butterflies live. However, despite the fact that moths, as we know, love heat and light, their life cycle is directly proportional to the degree of geographical latitude. Species inhabiting the Arctic and subarctic latitudes can generally live up to two years, because lean food and short time do not allow the larva to accumulate enough useful substances to turn into a winged insect, and the next spring the adult does not appear from the pupa. Prolonged "youth" allows the caterpillar to live another one, an additional year.

The number of live butterflies is affected by migration flights, if any. If a year the insects make two migrations, then in summer two generations alternate: the chrysalids (pupae) open in the spring and late summer. Wintering butterflies spend the longest period of their life in the pupa stage: the caterpillars envelop themselves with a cocoon in the beginning of autumn, and leave the unnecessary shell with the onset of stable heat. There are varieties that manage to hibernate in the stage of a caterpillar, for example, a crimson silkworm, but this is rather an incident than a generally accepted rule. Typically, silkworms wove themselves a warm cocoon, for which they are bred to get natural silk.

But the thistle vanessa, day peacock eye and lemon grass can winter in the adult stage. Of course, how much the butterflies live, the severity of the winter and the place they have chosen for wintering influence the winter. Fierce cold can kill a gentle creature, and winter thaws or warmth of human dwellings can pull the moth out of the stage of anabiosis and it perishes from exhaustion. If you want to prolong the life of such a beauty, you need to create conditions for it that are as close as possible to those that it experiences in the adult stage: sufficient lighting, heat (for tropical species no less than +28), nectariferous plants. Then, in spite of a short life, she will leave to you as a consolation her descendants, who, generation after generation, will delight you with their iridescent fluttering.