What eats butterflies?
Anything that preys on other insects will also eat butterflies and caterpillars. Ants, wasps, birds, preying mantises, walking sticks, etc., will eat them. Some caterpillars and butterflies eat toxic plants and they save the toxicity in their bodies, thus making them toxic too. They usually don’t get eaten by predators. Some other species of butterflies camouflage themselves to look like toxic species so they don’t get eaten either. An example: Monarchs are toxic and Queens look like them so they seldom get attacked. I planted a maypop (purple) passion vine about a month ago for a beginners butterfly garden.. Within a week, it had 6 or 8 caterpillars feeding happily. Now, there are no caterpillars that I can see, but I do see a lot of ants. Did they eat my caterpillars? If so, what can I do about it? Thanks and I hope you can help. No, the ants seems to really like passion vine for some reason, but they don’t eat your caterpillars. Sometimes birds get them, especially when they get big
