Spend a moment in our Butterfly Rainforest with Ryan talking about the Spicebush swallowtail, Papilio troilus, native to Florida. This butterfly is a mimic. It relies on predators mistaking its markings for a Pipevine swallowtail, which is toxic.
Spicebush swallowtail butterflies can be found throughout Florida except for the Miami area and the Keys!
Transcript
Hello. Welcome back to the Butterfly Rainforest at the Florida Museum of Natural History. My name is Ryan. And today we’ll be releasing a butterfly that’s actually not one of our tropical butterflies.
It’s from Florida and the eastern United States as a whole. It is referred to as the Spicebush swallowtail, so named because as a caterpillar it eats the leaves of a spicebush plant. Now it does also eat other plants in the laurel family such as sassafras.
You can see this lovely blue marking here on the inside of the wings right there, and on the outside it has these rows of blue with orange and that is because this butterfly is what we refer to as a mimic. He’s a copycat. This butterfly is hoping that you all have already eaten a toxic butterfly called the Pipevine swallowtail and you have thus associated those colors and those patterns with being toxic. So this butterfly is not Itself toxic, again, because it eats things in the laurel family, but it’s hoping that you think that it is. The Pipevine swallowtail has multiple mimics here in the eastern United States, the Spicebush being just one of them.
We’ll talk a little bit more about those as those butterflies become available. I hope you’ve all enjoyed and hope you have a great rest of the day. Thank you. Take care.
About the Butterfly Rainforest exhibit
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Support the exhibitVideo by Ryan Fessenden; Produced by Radha Krueger