Spend a moment in our Butterfly Rainforest with Ryan talking about the Orange cracker butterflies, Hamadryas fornax. They get their name ‘cracker’ from the sound they make when defending their territory from other males.
Here in the exhibit you’ll see these calico patterned butterflies basking on trees and foliage upside down.
Transcript
Hello again. Welcome to the Butterfly Rainforest at the Florida Museum of Natural History. My name is Ryan and today we’ll be releasing a slightly different type of butterfly.
We refer to it as a Cracker. We like to say here in Florida that’s not because it’s native to Florida — it’s not. Because cowboys in Florida were referred to as crackers. But here refers to what’s called the orange cracker because of the orange hue on the outside of its wings but these butterflies almost always never close their wings. Instead, they have this kind of calico design on the outside of its wings. And this is how you’ll typically see them and they’ll be kind of resting like this on trees, primarily. And they’re called Crackers because they’re some of the only butterflies that make a sound that we can hear And it might sound like a cracking of a whip, especially to a 17th-century naturalist, but to more modern ears, at least to my ears, when they make the cracking sound it kind of sounds like the electric popping of a Taser, believe it or not.
Now you’re not going to hear this happen all of the time. These Cracker butterflies will only do it when they’re defending their territory from other Crackers, and by that I mean male Crackers specifically. So, unfortunately it’s not something we get to hear all the time and in our exhibit we have many waterfalls which kind of obscures some sounds like that.
But you’ll also see that the Cracker butterfly’s feeding on fruit, they will not feed on flowers, they’re not true pollinating butterflies. Looks like he’ll hang out there a little bit longer there, opening and closing his wings.
On that note, again, I hope you’ve enjoyed our little butterfly spotlight today. I hope you remain healthy and safe out there, 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