Are butterflies and moths the same insect?

Butterflies are flying flowers and exquisite dancers. Elegant and colorful butterflies are popular with writers and writers. In spring, seeing the colorful butterflies dancing on the branches of flowers, the poet Du Fu's happiness jumped to the paper, and he accomplished "A solitary step by the riverside in search of flowers": "The flowers of Huang Si-niang's house are all over the grove, and a thousand of them are pressing down on the branches. The butterflies are always dancing, and the warblers are always crying." Xie Yi, a poet of the Northern Song Dynasty, was perhaps the most obsessed with butterflies. He wrote 300 butterfly poems, including many good lines, such as "azaleas fly through the grass smoke, butterflies cause residual flowers dew", so people nicknamed "Xie Butterfly".

Mentioning butterflies, people can't help but compare them with moths. Indeed, they have very close relatives, is the lepidopteran insects of the two categories. They are completely metamorphic development of insects, life through the egg, larvae, pupa, adult four morphology completely different stages of development. Eggs and pupae do not eat, drink or move, and are in a static state in appearance, so let's not worry about it for now, let's learn about the larvae and adults of moths and butterflies first.

Love to hate caterpillars. Colorful butterflies, like moths, are transformed from intimidating caterpillars. We generally refer to the larvae of Lepidoptera insects collectively as caterpillars. They are soft, colorful and patterned, with a cylindrical body divided into three segments: head, thorax and abdomen. Like adults, caterpillars have three pairs of segmented thoracic legs. However, in order to support the obese body, the caterpillar's abdomen also often has a fleshy, non-segmented protuberance, constituting four pairs of gastropods and one pair of caudipods.

Caterpillars eat a lot and grow fast, increasing their body weight two to three hundred times in their lifetime. However, their bodies have a chitinous exoskeleton that cannot expand indefinitely. As a result, as their bodies grow, caterpillars are as uncomfortable as if they were under the spell of the Tang Monk. Fortunately, natural selection has allowed caterpillars to evolve the ability to molt, and they molt every time they grow for a period of time when the exoskeleton is just too much for their bodies to handle. Normally, most caterpillars molt five times in their lives.

For the layman, it can be difficult to tell whether a caterpillar is a butterfly larva or a moth larva. Professionals, on the other hand, differentiate mainly by the number, length and arrangement of the toe hooks, the arrangement of the valves, and how many hairs are sequenced and how many gastropods are present.

While it's not easy to distinguish between the larvae of butterflies and moths, we do know that the most obnoxious caterpillars have to be the larvae of moths - they have chillingly venomous hairs. Although not all moth larvae are poisonous, toxic caterpillars are almost always moth larvae.

For example, the larvae of dead leaf moths are covered in thick hairs, some species brightly colored and striking, others as gray as bark. The pine caterpillar is the larva of one type of leaf moth. It is covered with short and long white, black or brown hairs, which are arranged in clusters on its back. If you are accidentally stung by the poisonous hairs of the pine caterpillar, your skin will become itchy, red, swollen and painful, and it can even cause inflammation. In addition, the larvae of the Stinging Moth family, such as the live chorizo, the foreign chorizo, and the stinging caterpillar, are intimidating and poisonous caterpillars, whose bodies are densely covered with thorns and venomous hairs, thus earning them the name Stinging Moths.

The caterpillar's "hair" is a body wall protrusion derivative, there are many kinds, the most common is the bristles. The most common is the bristle, and the bristles that are attached to the cells of the poisonous gland are the ones that cause us problems. Caterpillars are fat, succulent, and coveted by many birds and reptiles, but they can neither fly nor run fast, so nature has blessed them with poisonous hairs to camouflage themselves or warn off predators.

Some people find cockatoo larvae cute and charming. They are large, round and fleshy. Although they don't have poisonous hairs to protect themselves like the pine caterpillar or the chili pepper, they do have a unique secret weapon - the stinky girl gland. These glands are usually contracted inside the head and cannot be seen on the outside. When in shock, feel the danger, the larvae will be filled with body fluids into the stink of Ya gland, its head will be like magic out of the orange or lemon yellow "Ya" shaped stink of glands, creating the effect of the snake spitting, in order to confuse, threaten the natural enemy, at the same time, but also give off a nasty odor to warn the natural enemy, so as to achieve the purpose of protecting themselves.

The most famous caterpillar is the "baby silkworm". In the Shaanxi History Museum, there is a rare artifact from the Han Dynasty called the gilt-bronze silkworm. It is as big as a real baby silkworm, only 5.6 centimeters in length, but its head spitting out silk is vivid and realistic, loveable and amazing.

In fact, more than 3,000 years ago, the Chinese began to plant mulberry and raise silkworms to harvest cocoons and make silk. At the end of the Warring States period, Xunzi, a thinker and educator, wrote "Silkworm Fugue", which can be said to be a milestone in the scientific knowledge of ancient Chinese people about silkworm production technology. In "Silkworm Fugue", Xunzi praised the silkworm "repeatedly transformed like a god, the work of the world, for ten thousand generations of text. Rituals and music to become, noble and lowly to divide, old age and young, to be and then survive." In traditional Chinese culture, the silkworm is endowed with beautiful connotations such as nurturing and wealth. By the Han Dynasty, China's sericulture and silk-reeling industry had reached its peak.

Mentioning silkworms, people also often recall a poem known to women and children -- "The spring silkworm is not finished until it dies". Young silkworms eat mulberry leaves, molt four times, become mature silkworms, then spit silk cocoon - with a length of about 2 kilometers of silk, weaving a beautiful egg-shaped cocoon - and lie down in it. Li Shangyin is a poet rather than an entomologist, he did not know, the silkworm spit out the silk when, in fact, did not die, just go through the life of the larval stage, "cocoon" into a pupa only, and finally will "break the cocoon", feathered into moths.

The butterfly and the moth have been recognized in three ways. Although there are many similarities between adult butterflies and moths, such as siphon mouthparts, three pairs of segmented legs, two pairs of membranous wings, and scales densely covering the body and wings, it is much easier to distinguish between adult butterflies and moths than between their larvae.

Moths and butterflies differ in appearance, first and foremost, in the mottled pattern composed of scales and villi. Each moth and butterfly has its own distinctive markings, although most butterflies are more brightly colored than moths and have much less down on the surface of their wings and trunks.

Secondly, there is a difference in body size, with moths usually having thick, short, fat abdomens, while butterflies are slim. Butterflies and moths on the form of the most important difference in the tentacles: butterflies are stick-like tentacles, tentacle base sections long and thin as a rod, the end of the several sections gradually expanding, the whole shape like a baseball bat; and moths tentacles in a variety of forms, to the plumage is more, there are also filamentous, pectenoid and so on, such as silk worm moths, moths, mulberry moths are plumage-like tentacles.

From the point of view of living habits, butterflies are busy only during the day. "Whisking green and wearing red the sun is long, a lifetime's heart lives in springtime." Reading this poem by Xu Cui, you must know that he chanted about butterflies rather than moths. "By the shadow of the lamp with the jade hairpin plucked diagonally, the red flame is plucked to save the moth." "The lamp green with orchid paste rests, and the moths dance in the falling light." These verses of Zhang Hu and Li He vividly illustrate that moths prefer nocturnal activities.

Qi Ji, a famous poet monk at the end of the Tang Dynasty, wrote in a poem titled "Lamps", "The ghostly light of the empty Cao Tang Hall, the window between the moths hates not being able to get through." It can be seen that moths flying in the dark have a clear tendency to light, and often mistake lights and firelight for moonlight and fly toward it, which is "moths to the flame".

Moths are not blindly passionate about light, but because they rely on moonlight and starlight to navigate at night. Because celestial bodies are far away and the light coming from them is parallel light, moths can fly in a straight line and take the shortest route to their destination by flying at a fixed angle to the direction of the light, thus saving energy. However, with the light, the light from the light is not parallel but diffuse, but the moths still follow the instinct to fly along the same angle of the light, and as a result, its flight route becomes a "golden spiral", and eventually the "moth to the flame" tragedy. The tragedy of the "moth to the flame" occurred in the end.

The few moths that fly during the day may be able to avoid such a tragedy. For example, the sunset moth, famous for its beauty, is a daytime-flying moth. Because the colors and patterns on the wings of the sunset moth are as showy as those of a butterfly and because it prefers to be active during the day, Drew Drury mistakenly regarded it as a butterfly in 1773 and classified it in the genus Crested Butterfly. In addition, the beaked sky moth is also active during the day like butterflies, and has some characteristics similar to butterflies

, so it is also called the hummingbird butterfly moth. In the spring, many antworms (young silkworms) hatch on the fresh mulberry leaves, which are full of life, colorful, and butterflies dance wildly. The dark brown antworms feed on the mulberry leaves and quickly grow and develop into greenish-white silkworms. When the Southern Song lyricist Xin Qiji wrote "Butterflies are flying in disarray, and silkworms are growing on the tender mulberry leaves" in Linjiangxian (Linjiang Xian), I wonder if he subconsciously associated butterflies with silkworms.

However, we now know that butterflies and silkworms are really close relatives, even though they seem to have nothing to do with each other.