Hi everyone I'm Jayde Lovell for Inside
Science
We're all familiar with the butterfly
effect
the analogy that the wind from a
butterfly's wings or any other tiny
variations
can cause huge weather affects
somewhere else in the world
but how do butterflies create those
breezes in the first place? Well first off butterflies
are totally the dancing queens of the animal world
they have amazing and unnecessarily huge wings for their tiny bodies their wings are way bigger than many other insects at the same weight.
And new research shows butterflies don't
even need all that wing span.
they can still fly even when their
wings and damaged or even with half of their wing's cut off.
so how does an insect that is huge
brightly-colored and extremely visible
manage to avoid getting eaten by
predators?  Well those massive wings are the answer
A butterfly's  massive wings enable it
to turn faster
it's like having a big rudder on a ship
the bigger the rudder the faster you can turn
having a little rudder means you can't
turn as fast
but a big rudder means you can go woosh! and turn like that.
If you've ever tried to catch a butterfly you'll know exactly what I mean 
those suckers are tricky.
Butterflie's use their huge wings to create an erratic
fluttering pattern which is unique to
butterflies and very hard for predators to predict
rather than flapping up and down like a
bird does, who fall victim to predators
all the time by the way, butterflies
contract their bodies
to make a figure 8 pattern with their
wings.
We can model this by using this rubber ball to represent the butterfly's body
and these as the wings.
So as the butterfly's body contracts it pulls the wings up
and pushes air underneath them and then as the butterflies body returns to normal
it pushes the wings down, creating lift.  Pretty cool huh?!
Check out the links below for some other cool information on how butterflies fly.
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