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Butterflies and Moths – What’s the difference?

Categories: Butterfly Lives
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What Will You Learn?

  • How to intelligently answer the question: 'what's the difference between a butterfly and a moth?'
  • How butterflies and moths (Lepidoptera) came to be separated into groups
  • How naturalists have changed the descriptions of these groups over time to take their complexity into account
  • A little bit about the structure and diversity of the order Lepidoptera - butterflies and moths
  • This is too huge a subject to be covered adequately on a short course like this, but it will help you to study it further and gain understanding
  • How they are divided into a hierarchy of superfamilies, families, subfamilies etc
  • Which superfamily is butterflies and what do the others consist of?
  • How many of each type there are
  • What they have in common and what sets them apart from one another
  • Which differences are artificial and which are real
  • Where people have created rules with so many exceptions that they don't help in discerning between 'butterflies' and 'moths'

Course Content

How can I tell the difference between a butterfly and a moth?
This is one of the most frequent questions that crop up at my lectures, training courses, and guided walks.

  • What’s the difference between a butterfly and a moth? Where to start?
    06:34
  • What sort of similarities exist between butterflies and moths?

The diversity of ‘moths’
There are 46 superfamilies of insects in the order Lepidoptera. Only one is the traditional butterflies. Here we look at some examples of the others, which are referred to as 'moths' in English.

Butterflies versus moths – mythbusting!
We’ve looked at what butterflies and moths have in common. What are some of the differences traditionally used to separate them? Many of these ‘rules’ are full of holes, and on close examination turn out to be ‘myths about moths.’

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