Spend a moment in our Butterfly Rainforest with Ryan talking about the Postman, Heliconius melpomene, and Small postman, Heliconius erato, butterflies. They have very similar markings which are warnings to predators that they are toxic to eat.
Learn how to tell these two similar looking species apart here in the exhibit.
Transcript
Hello. Welcome to the Butterfly Rainforest at the Florida Museum of Natural History. My name is Ryan and today we’re going to actually be releasing two species of butterflies, although at a glance you might think that we’re actually just releasing one. And that’s because these two butterflies share the same pattern.
The first is what’s referred to as the Postman longwing. It is of course related to all the other longwing butterflies we have. You can see he has these yellow stripes on the inside and red on the outside. That butterfly only looks like that in Central America. In South America there is a much higher degree of variation in color and pattern, which we’ll discuss in another video. But no matter where the postman goes, so too will there be the second species we’re about to show you called the small postman, that’s the same pattern no matter where it goes. So in Central America where it always looks like this, so too, Small postmen look just the same. In either case you’re going to have this very similar pattern.
The only only real difference is on the outside, you’ll have two stripes. You have a yellow stripe here and a thicker stripe in the middle for the Postman butterfly. For the Small postman, the wing is slightly narrower, but that’s not a terribly reliable way to tell them apart. Now instead, the stripe here goes all the way to the edge of the wing, the hindwing, but it is narrower. But that’s your only real tell you are looking at Small postman instead of a Postman.
Regardless they’re both very cool butterflies and they are very popular and common to see a butterfly houses such as the Butterfly Rainforest. That being said, I hope you’ve enjoyed and hope you have a great rest of the day. Tare care.
About the Butterfly Rainforest exhibit
Support the exhibitVideo by Ryan Fessenden; Produced by Radha Krueger