Wallace's golden birdwing
Wallace's golden birdwing is a big, glowing butterfly from the islands of Indonesia. The boy has black front wings with a yellow band, golden back wings and a yellow tummy. The girl is bigger and brown with rows of yellow marks.
How fast is it?
Fun facts
When Alfred Russel Wallace caught his first one, he was so excited that his heart pounded and he had a headache for the rest of the day.
Underneath, the boy's wings are black with lines of green arrow-shaped marks.
Girls are bigger than boys and look quite different.
It lives only on a few islands east of an invisible line in nature called the Wallace Line.
It is protected, so only butterflies raised on farms may be sold to other countries.
Most asked questions about Wallace's golden birdwing
?Where does Wallace's golden birdwing live?
Only on islands in northern Maluku, Indonesia.
?Who discovered Wallace's golden birdwing?
The explorer Alfred Russel Wallace described it in 1859.
?Is it endangered?
It is near threatened, so there are rules to protect it.
For bug experts
- Scientific name
- Ornithoptera croesus
- Named by
- Wallace, 1859
- Group
- Butterflies
- Family
- Papilionidae
- Classification
- Insecta > Lepidoptera > Papilionidae
- Lives on
- Asia
Where the facts come from
- Ornithoptera croesus (Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0): what it looks like, where it lives, what it eats, sizes and fun facts, retold in simple words.
- Picture by Notafly. CC BY-SA 3.0, Wikimedia Commons. The round sticker of this bug is cut from the same picture.
If we got something wrong, sorry, we are bug fans, not a science journal. Tell us at hello@bugwiki.app and we will fix it.
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