Painted Lady Butterfly

The painted lady is a pretty orange, black, and white butterfly that you can find fluttering over meadows and gardens in much of the world. Its wings are about as wide as a grown-up’s palm, patterned with soft orange, dark tips, and little white spots near the front edges.

Painted ladies are famous for one amazing thing: they are great travellers. Each year huge numbers of them fly enormous distances, journeying thousands of kilometres between Africa and Europe. It is one of the longest journeys made by any insect anywhere on Earth.

The really surprising part is that no single butterfly makes the whole round trip. A painted lady only lives for a few weeks, so the journey is shared across several generations, like a relay race. The butterflies that finally arrive back home are the great-grandchildren of the ones that first flew off.

When they are caterpillars, painted ladies munch on leaves, and thistles are one of their favourite plants. Grown-up butterflies sip sweet nectar from flowers through a long, curly tongue. As they move from bloom to bloom, they carry pollen along and help plants make seeds.

The painted lady is one of the most widespread butterflies in the world, living almost everywhere except Antarctica and South America. It is so common that the worldwide list of threatened species (kept by the IUCN) has never needed to give it a rating. It helps a lot when people grow wild flowers and go easy on bug sprays, so these traveller butterflies always have food along their long road.