2 Tips for Attracting Butterflies to Your Home
Butterfly Garden | Pollinators | Hostplants | Balcony Gardens | Butterfly Conservation If you love nature, having butterflies visit your garden is very rewarding. They bring beauty and colour and help pollinate plants. When considering what type of butterfly garden you’d like to create, ask yourself how much space you have, how much sun […]
Games of Hide & Go-Seek with Glasswing Butterflies
glasswing | butterfly | camouflage | survival traits | insect photography If you were an insect being hunted by a notorious predator, what superpower would you choose? In the butterfly world flaunting bright reds, oranges and yellows communicates risk of toxicity and certain death to predators. In other cases, some butterflies have chosen precisely […]
Sex Determination of Cairns Birdwing Butterfly Pupae
Birdwing Butterfly | Laboratory Methods | Population Dynamics | Captive Breeding | Sex Determination The Cairns Birdwing (Ornithoptera euphorion) is one of the most celebrated butterfly species in the world. With an average wingspan of 16cm, it counts as the largest butterfly species in Australia and indeed, in Far North Queensland. Since opening our doors […]
How Butterflies ‘Breathe’ Oxygen Through 4 Life Stages
spiracles | butterfly anatomy | butterfly physiology | metamorphosis | oxygen Almost all living organisms on Earth require oxygen to survive. The purpose? To digest and gain energy from food. These organisms, called ‘obligate aerobes’, use external and internal body parts to uptake and process oxygen. Humans uptake oxygen using their noses and […]
The Australian Butterfly Sanctuary Museum: A Brief History
Museum | Lepidoptera | Kuranda History | Educational Tourism | Insect Pinning Our museum comprising over 400 butterflies and moths certainly does draw a keen eye. Paul and Sue Wright thought as much when they opened the doors to the Australian Butterfly Sanctuary in 1987. Starting from humble beginnings, their dream of turning their butterfly […]
3 Favourite Butterfly Books for Kids
Kids books | Reading | Storytime | Butterfly Books | Early Learning There’s nothing quite like story time with a good old-fashioned hard cover book. For many of us, story time built many memorable moments with family, friends and teachers. You know the ones … classic books like the “The Very Hungry Caterpillar” are […]
What do Butterflies & Crustaceans have in Common?
exoskeleton | chitin | invertebrates | butterfly | morphology Have you ever wondered what butterfly wings are made of? Believe it or not, they’re actually made of the same stuff found in crustaceans, spiders and all sorts of other invertebrates in the phylum Arthropoda. This ‘stuff’, we talk about in more detail below, is […]
4 Tips for Discovering Butterfly Eggs
4 Tips for Discovering Butterfly Eggs butterfly eggs | macrophotography | butterfly identification | new hobby| conservation Butterfly eggs aren’t the tiniest eggs on Planet Earth, but you will need optimal vision to see them. Despite their small size, butterfly eggs are fascinating to witness in nature. Most are perfectly round, some are domed with […]
In Our Garden: The Mesmerising Bat Flower
In Our Garden: The Mesmerising Bat Flower Bat Flower | Tropical Garden | Exotic Flowers | Tacca spp. | Dioscoreaceae When you see one of our bat flowers peering out from the leafy understory in our tropical garden, a similar response often echoes … wow! Indeed, bat flowers are unlike any other flowering […]