A butterfly uses which body part to taste food?

Butterflies don’t really have mouths, much less taste buds, to help them decide if food tastes good or bad. Instead, they use their feet!

To eat, a butterfly unwinds a long, skinny part of its body called a proboscis, and sucks up liquids like nectars and juices. It works for nutrients, but the proboscis does not have sensors to determine taste. Instead, those sensors are located on the back of the butterfly’s legs. The insect will step on its food to sense dissolving sugars.  Even more importantly, a female butterfly will use her feet to drum on a plant and “taste” its juices. This helps her decide if the leaf would be edible to a caterpillar, and therefore, if she has found a suitable place to lay eggs.

In butterflies, these chemoreceptors lie on the tarsus. Insect legs are subdivided into different segments, as the picture below shows. The tarsus is located distally, meaning “away from the body”.

Just as humans can taste the sweet in sugar and the bitterness of medicine, insects can sense different tastes too! They can sense sweet, bitter, sour and salty through their chemoreceptors.

This strategy is crucial for butterfly survival. In a review published in Insect Molecular Biology, the authors noted that multiple behavioral studies have shown that butterflies use taste to make many important choices. This informs not only what in their surroundings is food, but also guides them in choosing a mate, and deciding where to lay their eggs.

Credit : Science ABC

Picture Credit : Google

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