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As a SciShow viewer, you can keep building your STEM skills with a 30 day free trial and 20% off an annual premium subscription at Brilliant.org/SciShow. You might think butterflies are just pretty flappy things happily perching on flowers being generally lovely and harmless.

But let’s pretend for a second that you’re locked in a cage match with a butterfly. Would you always win? Are you sure?

It’s true that butterflies and moths as a whole are pretty well known for lacking any obvious physical weapons to engage in combat. But that’s not the same as being totally defenseless. A lot of things like to eat butterflies – so as you’d expect, they’ve got a few tricks up their sleeves to turn the tables.

Here’s a few examples of why that cage match might not be a sure thing. [Intro music] Some butterflies choose to throw down the complex way, with powerful friends or deadly toxins or ornate body parts. Some do things the simple way. The old fashioned way.

They throw hands – well, wings. The African oakleaf butterfly dive bombs other butterflies in its territory. Other similar butterflies that do this, like the African monarch, are fairly equal opportunity with who they dive-bomb – taking on dragonflies, for example.

Not only do they come screaming toward their target out of the blue, but the monarchs also flash their colored wings as a disorientation tactic. Maybe you could overcome the instinct to scream and duck. But I think these species have a good shot in a fight.

And we’re just getting started. Butterflies in the family known as Lycaenidae like to buddy up with ant colonies. There are a number of genera in this group, but the one that interests us is Phengaris.

Basically: you mess with the larvae, you mess with their friends. Though… maybe friends isn’t quite the right word. The larvae in this group effectively trick the ants into looking after them.

It’s mainly believed they release chemical signatures that induce the ants to carry the larva safely to the nest. There, the ants care for and feed the larva… whose preferred food is ant eggs. Nice nest you got there.

Be a shame if something happened to it. The larva is sitting pretty in the middle of a nest of ants who have no choice but to feed and defend it, like the world’s comfiest mob boss. If you’ve ever run afoul of an ant nest, you know you probably don’t want to mess with the guy with the colony as hired muscle.

But a whole mob of minions isn’t the only way to swing a fight in your favor. Because good luck fighting something you can’t see. The European Swallowtail has mastered the art of the ol’ razzle dazzle.

One of its common predators is the great tit. That’s a kind of bird. Stop giggling.

When one of these birds encounters the butterfly, it flashes its wings, swapping from dull to bright colours quickly in a showy defense known as a deimatic or startle display. According to one study, In the vast majority of cases, this is a successful way for the butterfly to defend itself. And it’s not just that they’re toxic, or too colorful, to eat.

When offered dead swallowtails, great tits still preferentially eat them over other foods. So there doesn’t need to be anything truly dangerous about the butterfly. It’s just good enough at jump-scaring you that it doesn’t even need to fight.

And don’t think flying blind will save you either. Studies from other butterflies show this works on both familiar and naïve predators, so no matter how experienced you are – you’re going down. Next is the Julia butterfly.

Despite their reputation as dedicated nectar enjoyers, butterflies in general aren’t opposed to indulging in some pretty weird foods. Because some butterflies actually want you to cry… so they can drink your tears. Edgy as that sounds, this is a behavior known as lachryphagy that dozens of moths and butterflies engage in.

This is where the Julia butterfly comes in: If you’ve ever seen those stunning nature photos of butterflies drinking the tears of caimans, then this is the brilliant orange butterfly indulging in a spot of tear sipping. If they’re drinking alligator tears - what hope have you got? Of course, the question is why they’d do this.

It’s because your sobbing is actually the ideal protein shake. You might think they’re just salt water, but tears also have 200 times more protein than sweat. And that protein is easier to digest than the pollen they might pick up from visiting flowers.

Combine that with sweat being uncommon in the natural world, and it results in butterflies going for the eyes. Which means your salty tears are the ideal energy drink. Very little peer-reviewed research is available on this one, so it’s more of an honorable mention.

Tears are one thing, but it gets weirder, because the purple emperor butterfly eats roadkill. It normally lives high in the forest canopy, where they do everything: fight, mate, and so on. But it seems to be attracted to all kinds of smelly, awful things.

A common food seems to be carrion. In the London area, when there’s nothing dead and tasty around, they will also go for a nice big lump of dog feces. Delicious.

Do you really want to fight someone covered in that? Adult butterflies don’t feed on flowers at all, so this behavior seems to be a way of obtaining salt and other minerals – not energy, per se. But like I said, not a ton of research, so next time you’re in England in early summer, let us know if you spot these spectacular guys eating something awful… We’ve seen a few butterflies that are pretty tough in surprising ways, but silly cage match gag aside they’re not really trying to kill you.

This moth is trying to kill you. Well, maybe not the moth, but the caterpillar at least. Populations of the genus Eupitheca native to Hawai’i are actually predatory as caterpillars, so as butterflies, you’ll be facing them when they’re already hardened killers.

But how did those fat, friendly caterpillars turn killer? Well, it’s believed to be a combination of three things. One, the plants their ancestors ate were already pretty high in protein, so they had high expectations in that regard.

Two, when disturbed, they lash out at the attacker – which looks a lot like the way they capture prey. So over time, accidental captures may have become real ones. And three, with a lack of preying mantis types on the islands, there was an open niche for a leafy ambush predator.

So that’s how good caterpillars turned bad. This one is also an honorable mention, because it’s a similar case, but felt worth including. But more than just being killers in general, every adult moth in the genus Heterogynis has killed its own mother.

Adult females have no legs or wings, and after mating, they return to their cocoons, lay their eggs, and wait patiently for their larvae to eat them. Gruesome as that sounds butterflies don’t generally live to reproduce more than once anyway – so why not give their young a head start? This behavior even has a name: matrivory.

If you know any Latin, you can probably guess that literally translates into mother eating. And it’s not just a quick snack. Heterogynis are specialized for this behavior.

The mother has fat-rich tissues with very little gristle or indigestible parts. They even sometimes seal themselves in the cocoon with the larvae. So it’s not a whim - it’s a behavior that this genus is dedicated towards.

They’re natural-born killers. But what if you – somehow – manage to win against a butterfly? Well, that can end quite badly for you as well.

Many butterflies are pretty well known for being poisonous, which is to say not great eating. They can be poisonous in a lot of different ways, but a frequent one is with a class of chemicals called cardenolides. If that sounds it like it pertains to matters of the heart, it does.

By which I mean it stops it. So if you needed a reminder, don’t eat butterflies. One of the most famous for this is the monarch butterfly, the migratory North American butterfly with dazzling wing patterns.

But not only are they toxic, but they have different concentrations of toxins in different parts of the body. The wings have high concentrations of relatively weak toxins, to provide an initial warning to anyone who has a nibble. But if you learn to pluck the wings off and eat the body, as some birds do, then the body has a small but very potent dose of an emetic – the technical term for a barfing inducer.

So even if you try to get sneaky, you’re still going to hurl. Butterflies and moths have other ways to stop you from eating them, too. Even when they’re at their most vulnerable, they can still do a number on you.

The pupae their caterpillars transform into have defenses of their own. Some pupae have spikes, some are poisonous, and some, like the moth Gonometa postica, cover themselves in tiny delicate hairs that catch in your mouth and throat and cause massive irritation. So trying to eat one of them would be like taking a big bite of fiberglass insulation.

Ouch. So if you thought you could wait for them to be a reconstituting pile of biomush and then beat them in a fight… yeah, still not going to happen, I’m afraid. Even at their most helpless, butterflies can be pretty tough.

So there you have it, a vast assortment of beautiful insects who have their own subtle ways of beating you in a fight. Of course, we don’t ever actually expect you to end up in a cage match with a butterfly. All these species are just exhibiting behaviors and traits they’ve evolved to have – it isn’t good or bad.

But all this shows that nature is really creative when it comes to staying alive. Fists and teeth and claws and horns are good, but they aren’t the be-all, end-all of defending yourself. For a group with pretty much no “real” natural weapons, it’s amazing what evolution has come up with to protect them.

Few things in life are truly defenseless, and clearly even those beautiful, delicate butterflies aren’t the type to go down without a fight. This SciShow List Show is supported by Brilliant: an online learning platform with thousands of lessons in math, science, and computer science. Like their course on Cryptocurrency.

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