What's the difference between a butterfly and a moth?

Moment Of Um

Lemonada Media

Kids & Family, Education For Kids

4.4 • 1.5K Ratings

🗓️ 4 January 2024

⏱️ 4 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Picture this: you’re outside with a friend, and you both see a little insect flying around. It’s got a small dark body, some tiny antennae, and big colorful wings. You say, “What a beautiful butterfly!” But your friend says, “No, that’s a moth!” How can you tell the difference? We got entomologist Brian Brown to give us the key. If you’ve got a Moment of Um question fluttering around in your brain, send it to us at BrainsOn.org/contact and we’ll try to catch the answer. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Transcript

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0:00.0	From the brains behind brains on, this is Moment of Um.
0:05.8	Answering the questions that make you go...
0:08.0	Uh-huh.
0:09.0	Um-huh.
0:10.0	Um-um-um-up.
0:12.0	Um-huh.
0:14.0	I'm Mark Sanchez.
0:21.9	Okay, imagine you're in a beautiful garden.
0:25.0	There are colorful flowers everywhere, fragrant herbs, and lots of butterflies,
0:31.3	gently flapping their way from place to place.
0:33.9	You manage to get very close to a super cool black and red one,
0:37.3	and according to your nature guide, it's called a cinnabar moth.
0:41.8	But wait, a moth? It's not a butterfly?
0:46.3	Hmm. This reminds me of a question we got from Silas.
0:50.0	My name is Silas from Fitzger, Wisconsin, and my question is, what's the difference between a butterfly and a mom?
0:58.5	My name is Brian Brown. I'm curator of entomology here at the Natural History Museum in Los Angeles,
1:03.8	and my job is to oversee research and growth of the insect collection here. It's six million specimens
1:09.4	from all over the world. You never run out of
1:11.9	new things to find. Well, to start with, in one sense, there's really no difference between
1:17.2	butterflies and moths. They're both members of a group called the Lepidoptera or the scaly-winged
1:22.6	insects. And we tend to think of the colorful, day-active ones as butterflies and the drab nocturnal ones as moths.
1:30.1	But there's exceptions to both those rules.
	...

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