Spend a moment in our Butterfly Rainforest with Ryan talking about the proper way to handle butterflies. Although there are recommended ways to safely hold a butterfly, any way you do it, you’re taking scales off their wings.
We only handle butterflies on a few occasions, and we ask our visitors to refrain from touching butterflies in the Butterfly Rainforest.
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 talking a little bit about handling butterflies.
When visiting the Butterfly Rainforest, or perhaps in other videos, you’ll note that I am handling butterflies and I’m sure many of you have heard that if you touch a butterfly it dies, and that is very much not the case. There are many ways to handle a butterfly and not kill them. No matter how you handle them, however, you will be taking some of their scales off of their wings.
Typically here at the Rainforest there are two ways we like to handle them, and this is the first way, this little pinching motion here between two fingers. Now the top, or forewings, here are the parts of the wings that allow for flight. They push down on the bottom or hindwings and all the musculature that moves those wings are actually in the thorax, in the body itself, and that means that if you grab their wings towards the tips here or in the back here, these wings can still move and that means their wings could snap in your fingers. So you’re gonna want to hold right above the head, just where the wings are coming out at the top. That way the top wings can’t move, so none of the wings at all are moving.
The other way you can handle a butterfly, is by holding the thorax itself, like such. This takes a little bit more practice obviously, because too hard and you’ll have very unfortunate results, and too soft and the butterfly will escape. Gentle but firm is how we like to phrase it here.
Regardless of how you handle that butterfly you will still take some of the scales off of their wings. Now, this happens naturally in a butterfly’s life, but we try to reduce this as much as possible so we try to only handle the butterflies when we put them in the box and when we let them go. So we generally recommend that you leave it to the butterfly wranglers here in the Butterfly Rainforest. In the wild it’s a bit trickier.
I hope you’ve enjoyed and hope you have a great rest of the day. Thank you
About the Butterfly Rainforest exhibit
Support the exhibitVideo by Ryan Fessenden; Produced by Radha Krueger