Richard Hamblen, age 11, of Cleveland, Ohio, or his question;
How many kinds of butterflies are there?
If you searched all over North America~ you could find about 7,000 different butterflies and moths. In the whole world, well over one hundred thousand of these glamorous insects have been named and classified. Fut this is by no means all of them. Thousands of butterflies in faraway places are still waiting to be sorted and named. Right now, one of Andy’s friends is in Africa with a camera and miles of color film. He hopes to add a few more of the tropical beauties to the uncompleted list.
Though we cannot yet say exactly how many different butterflies exist in the world, we do know how to classify a stranger when we find him, Butterflies belong to the order of insects called Lepidoptera, which means the scaly‑winged ones. Our eyes see a butterfly wing as a fragile scrap of gorgeous velvet and perhaps that long Latin name seems strange, It takes a microscope to show why butterflies are classed under Lepidoptera, the scaly winged insects.
Under a powerful lens, a section of butterfly wing looks like a miniature city of skyscrapers made of clear plastic. The little buildings are the scales from which the order of insects gets its name. They are far finer than the finest dust. It is those little scales that give the butterflies their jeweled colors. For they act like prisms to split or refract the light and reveal the rainbow colors of which it is made,
The Lepidoptera order of insects is divided into two sub‑orders. The moths, who are the night flying cousins of the butterflies, have one suborder to themselves. The butterflies belong in the sub‑order Rhopalocera ‑and even this strange name makes sense. It refers to the antennae of the butterfly insects and means club‑horned. As you notice, the antennae of a butterfly are long and slender ending in little bumps, or clubs. So a butterfly is classed in the scaly‑winged order and the club‑horn sub‑order.
This huge group of insects contains thousands and thousands of different butterflies. Sorting is simplified by dividing their numbers into about 75 small( families. The members of each family are noticeably alike but different enough to rate as separate individuals One of the most glamorousfamilies in North America includes the swallow tailed butterflies. These black and yellow or brown and yellow beauties with the swooping tails will play the star role in your butterfly collection. The little skippers tdart around the bushes belong to another family. These follows resemble moths in that they rest with their wings outspread, but their club‑horned antennae show that they are true butterflies,
The yellow or sulfur butterflies belong to still another family. The orange and brown angel wings belong to a family which includes the dark‑winged mourning cloak butterfly. This family folds its beautiful wings in the fall and hibernates through the winter. They come out again in the spring sometimes before the winter snow has all melted
In a proper butterfly collection, the specimens are mounted according to their separate families. A world‑wide collection may contain 50,000 or more different varieties each mounted in one of the 75 or so separate families. But this would include only the named and classified butterflies. Someday it may grow to half a million or more.