Spend a moment in our Butterfly Rainforest with Ryan talking about the Large striped swordtail butterfly, Graphium antheus, native to Africa. These are larger butterflies with more distinct tails on their hind wings than some cousins.
Like the Tailed jay, you’ll find these swordtail butterflies fluttering their wings in the exhibit as they feed, or basking in the sunlight.
Transcript
Hello. Welcome to the Butterfly Rainforest at the Florida Museum of Natural History. My name is Ryan and today we’ll be releasing one of the swordtails from Africa.
This is the large striped swordtail in the genus Graphium. If the name Graphium sounds familiar it’s because it’s the same genus to the Tailed jay from Southeast Asia, but where the Tailed jay just has hints of a tail, the swordtails do have these longer pointed tails here. And they are also closely related to the Zebra swallowtail here in North America.
You see this one is a little on the fresher side — it just emerged in the last half hour or so — so its wings are still on a limp side, so he doesn’t quite ready to fly away, much to our advantage. You’ll note that it has this lovely blue color.
There are two other common swordtails you can find in butterfly houses: The Black swordtail which has blue and black, and the Cream-striped swordtail. Now being swallowtails, they do like to keep their wings fluttering very fast like hummingbirds as they feed. But they also tend to emerge a bit irregularly and by that I mean that if I have 20 of these swordtails come from a butterfly farm in Africa, which is where these guys are from, Kenya. It may take weeks for them to emerge, so the chances of seeing a whole bunch of them at once inside of a butterfly house is relatively slim. Usually you might see one or two, so getting a chance to see even one flying around inside of the exhibit is a rare and wonderful thing you should definitely cherish.
So on that note, I hope you get to see one when you visit the Butterfly Rainforest or another butterfly house. I hope you’ve all enjoyed today and have a great rest of the day. Thank you.
About the Butterfly Rainforest exhibit
Support the exhibitVideo by Ryan Fessenden; Produced by Radha Krueger