How long do butterflies live?
How long do butterflies live?
Winged adults of many (and perhaps most) species live only a week or two, and that the male tends to live a few days less than the female. However, in some species, the adult life span of some generations may be much longer. For example, in some species, adults that emerge in late summer or early fall hibernate overwinteri in a sheltered spot. Also fall-hatched monarch butterflies migrate south in fall and northward in spring. Adults of these species may survive for 8-9 months or longer.
Total life span includes time spent in the larval and pupal stages, as well as the adult stage. Each species description in Butterflies and Moths of North America includes the number of annual “flights” for that species. A flight is a generation of adults. Thus, if a species has “two flights from May through September” it means that one generation will emerge from the pupal stage in spring and a second in summer. Actual months of emergence depend on latitude. Life spans of these two generations will be very different depending upon the species’ strategy for getting through the winter.
If the spring flight comes from eggs that were laid in fall by the previous year’s summer flight, the total life span for the spring flight is 10-11 months. Eggs laid in May/June by those adults develop much more rapidly, due to higher temperatures, and adults emerge in about 2-3 months, resulting in a total life span of 3½-4 months for the summer flight, or less than half that of the spring flight. However, if the species is one in which adults of the summer flight overwinter, then the spring flight develops from eggs laid in spring, and in this case the summer flight is the longer-lived generation.