SLOW Motion Butterfly Puddling - Smarter Every Day 80

Face be Destin. Welcome back to Smarter Every Day! We're back with Phil Torres, entomologist, and about two years ago I created the video about butterflies. That, about we're eating a fish, the pits have taken down the fray. That's not what was happening at all, is it?

What are they doing? It's called puddling. Basically, they're drinking the minerals in the sand to get salt.

All right, so here's the deal. This is the Tambopata River, which feeds into the Amazon River. It's a little bit different than Alabama, but right over there, if you look really close, you can see there are some yellow butterflies. What we're going to do is we're going to take this high-speed camera, see if we can sneak up on them, and get high-speed of all those butterflies cuddling. See what it looks like. We should really sneak up close enough.

Okay, it's going to take me a second to get over there, so let's talk. When you come up on a big group of butterflies like this, they're almost all male. This is why when I fertilize my wife, I provide her selflessly with some liquid that has little swimming things in it in my genetic code.

But male butterflies burn much more heavily invested than this. They create what's called a spermatophore. Now that's basically just a structure that has all their swimming things in it, but it also has nutrients that they've collected and saved for her, like sodium and things like that. You see, when a female lays eggs on a leaf, it requires a lot of sodium, and so he's helping out with the resource budget by giving her the spermatophore that she can draw from with her body. It's pretty cool.

So when I go over here and we kick up all these butterflies, I just almost hear a bunch of little angry voices saying, "Hey, we're kids! You see, we're trying to gather nutrients first!" Spermatophores here anyway. I'm almost there; let's check it out in high speed.

All right, my leg's in a hole; I'm not really gonna be able to move here. You want to walk up on the net side and scare a little bit? You got it? Three, two, one, let's go! Awesome, nice!

All right, that's it. If you want to see the entire video with the time code so you can figure out how many butterflies are flying at what time, I'll leave a link right here. So go click on that, and you can go look at that video. Otherwise, that's it.

No, it is right! It's not Walker. Do you know how much work it was to make this for you? You don't want to play along, do you? Now you... you move it!