WHAT ARE SOME FACTS ABOUT PAINTED LADY MIGRATION?

The annual painted lady butterfly migrations, which take six successive generations of painted butterflies to complete, cover a distance of 14,400 kilometers (9,000 miles) and start from the fringes to the Arctic and end in West Africa.
Painted lady butterfly
N81_painted-lady-butterfly

At the end of each summer, painted lady butterflies migrate south from northern Europe to Africa. According to Butterfly Conservation, they fly at an altitude of 500 meters (approximately 1,600 feet), riding favorable winds at an average speed of 48 kilometers per hour (30 miles/hour).

The annual migrations, which take six successive generations of painted butterflies to complete, cover a distance of 14,400 kilometers (9,000 miles) and start from the fringes to the Arctic and end in West Africa. The painted ladies that return to Africa in autumn are grandsons and granddaughters of the butterflies that left earlier in the year. With a brain, the size of a pinhead, the migration of the painted lady butterflies has amazed researchers.

American painted lady butterfly
American painted lady butterfly
N80_Butterfly_5

Recent posts

Diploptera punctuate cockroach's milk offers four times more nutrients than a cow's milk.

August 10, 2018
Wolf spiders prefer green color shades because it is more comfortable for them to catch prey and mate against green backgrounds.

August 8, 2018
Wrens are songbirds found in Australia, which are able to learn the language of other neighbors. Researchers taught the birds to recognize two previously unknown sounds to them as distress calls by playing them in conjunction with the wrens' alarm call, which the wrens associated with danger. After three days, the birds run for cover when they heard the strange sound they learned.

August 5, 2018

August 1, 2018
A lizard can shed off its tail when in danger.

July 29, 2018
Wolf spiders that live in the Arctic tundra enjoy eating the springtails, but spiders lose appetite them during summer the temperatures are warmer. The springtails feed on fungus, which in turn decomposes melting land matter to form form carbon dioxide and methane. The two gases are responsible to global warming, which means that the more wolf spiders feed on alternative food sources the better for global warming.

July 27, 2018

Join us on social media or subscribe!

Sign up to receive our articles in your inbox!

Enter your name and email address below to subscribe.