Spend a moment in our Butterfly Rainforest with Ryan talking about the Green longwing, Philaethria dido, native to Central and South America. These butterflies generally live in the forest canopy but will descend to streams for water.
Also called a Dido longwing, this species resembles the Malachite butterfly with similar coloring, but their wing shape is different.
Transcript
Hello. Welcome to the Butterfly Rainforest at the Florida Museum of Natural History. My name is Ryan and today we’re going to be releasing a butterfly that we haven’t had in the Butterfly Rainforest for several years now.
It is very attractive, at least in my opinion. It has a couple of names. The first, and its name we’ve typically used in the past, is the Dido… and of course he took right off. The other name is the Green longwing. That’s because it is closely related to the typical longwing butterfly. I’m sure the wing shape looks very familiar. If it does also look familiar, it’s because there’s another butterfly that shares the colors and patterns. And that is the Malachite. Now the Malachite has a crunched up wing and the markings are a little bit different, but the colors are still the same.
As to why it is that we haven’t had it in a long time, it’s entirely dependent on the butterfly farms. See all these butterflies from the tropics are not raised at the butterfly houses that you visit. They are raised at butterfly farms in their home countries. In this case, this butterfly came from Costa Rica and if the butterfly farm has lost their colony or they don’t have enough food or host plants to raise enough to ship out, then they simply don’t have the butterfly to send to butterfly houses such as ourselves.
That being said, I hope you’ve enjoyed and have a great rest of the day. Thank you.
About the Butterfly Rainforest exhibit
Support the ExhibitVideo by Ryan Fessenden; Produced by Radha Krueger