These Pretty Butterflies Are Poisonous?

BY AWAKE! CORRESPONDENT IN SOUTH AFRICA

HAVE you ever watched entranced as a butterfly fluttered by? Were you impressed by its beauty, its design, and its colors? As it flits from flower to flower, it seems to tantalize and tease you. You would love to get a closer look, maybe even a photograph, but it never seems to stop long enough on any one bloom​—and it is always twitching its wings up and down. But did you know that some of these delightful creatures are believed to be poisonous?

Let us take a look at the two on these pages​—the monarch (on the right), with its large black and orange-​brown wings, and the viceroy (above), which looks almost identical to the monarch, although it is usually smaller. What makes them poisonous, and what purpose does that serve?

Butterflies, of which there are more than 15,000 species, go through four stages of development to become those delicate winged wonders that we see in our gardens. One of these is the larva, or caterpillar, stage. The monarch caterpillar feeds on the toxic milkweed, and thus, it is claimed that it becomes “a truly toxic butterfly, potentially deadly to any bird that eats one and doesn’t vomit it back up,” writes Tim Walker in Science News. The poison is cardenolide, a heart poison. What about the viceroy butterfly?

Walker states: “For more than a century, the conventional wisdom has held that this winged insect cloaks a very appetizing body behind the colors of a toxic monarch butterfly, Danaus plexippus.” As you can see from the photos, the two butterflies have a very similar design except for the black inner line on the lower wings of the viceroy. During the last 100 years, evolutionists have believed that the viceroy evolved a wing design similar to that of the poisonous monarch in an effort to avoid attacks from birds that had learned to keep away from this distasteful butterfly. Except for that, it was believed, the viceroy was appetizing to birds.

What have investigators recently discovered? Walker writes: “New research indicates, however, that the viceroy has successfully deceived scientists, not birds. . . . Two zoologists have demonstrated that to discerning birds, the viceroy can taste just as foul as the noxious monarch.” But why is the viceroy distasteful, especially since its larvae eat nontoxic willows, not toxic plants? Walker writes: “This suggests that viceroy butterflies somehow manufacture their own chemical defense.”

In fact, the present state of entomology suggests that the experts still have much to learn and should perhaps be less reliant on their “conventional wisdom.” One critic wrote this about a recent book on the monarch butterfly: “This remarkable book shows us that the more we learn about the monarch the less we ‘know’ with confidence.”

Rather, it is as the Bible states: “You are worthy, Jehovah, even our God, to receive the glory and the honor and the power, because you created all things, and because of your will they existed and were created.”​—Revelation 4:11.

It is evident that man still has much to learn about all forms of life on our earth. One fundamental barrier to accurate knowledge is the refusal of many scientists to accept the existence and the active role of a Creator-​Designer. Paul Davies, professor of mathematical physics, wrote in his book The Mind of God: “There is no doubt that many scientists are opposed temperamentally to any form of metaphysical . . . arguments. They are scornful of the notion that there might exist a God, or even an impersonal creative principle or ground of being that would underpin reality . . . Personally I do not share their scorn. . . . I cannot believe that our existence in this universe is a mere quirk of fate, an accident of history, an incidental blip in the great cosmic drama.”

The psalmist David wrote: “The senseless one has said in his heart: ‘There is no Jehovah.’ They have acted ruinously, they have acted detestably in their dealing.” On the other hand, the wise person will humbly acknowledge the Creator, even as Isaiah the prophet did: “This is what Jehovah has said, the Creator of the heavens, He the true God, the Former of the earth and the Maker of it, He the One who firmly established it, who did not create it simply for nothing, who formed it even to be inhabited: ‘I am Jehovah, and there is no one else.’”​—Psalm 14:1; Isaiah 45:18.

[Pictures on page 16, 17]

Monarch (above), viceroy (page 16). A major difference is the black line through the lower wings of the viceroy. (Images not to scale)