Is it true that no 2 butterflies are identical? Is there a site anywhere that supports this fact? I'm googling without success.

Thanks!

Tree - try googling the exact phrase "no two butterflies" and see what you get.

Thanks fuse, but I tried that. The most successful one "No two butterflies are the same" took me to a jewelery site.

I Googled "no two butterflies", and found the exact statement, "there are no two butterflies alike" in quite a few sites. However, none were college or university sites*, and the school sites I did find seemed to be elementary school sites. I tried using "unique" in the search terms, but that didn't help. I suspect that, like the 98 mph dragonfly, this is not true.

*There were actually three, but two led me to frat/sorority pages and the third a student home page.

I think that would fall into the same category as fingerprints, etc. Impossible to prove since one couldn't possibly catch all the butterflies in the world. But if someone has ever found two identical ones they seem to have kept the information to themselves.

Thanks Frank. You seem quite correct.

I got this answer on another site:

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Have a look at the book "Butterflies of North America" by Jim P. Brock & Kenn Kaufman.

Here is an excerpt from the book.


QUOTE
Variation in butterflies: As with humans and other living things, no two
individual butterflies look exactly alike. Most of the variation within a
species is so minor that you won’t notice it in the field, but sometimes it’s
enough to cause confusion. Occasionally you’ll see an individual that looks
totally unlike the normal color pattern for its species; these aberrant
butterflies may be identifiable only by shape or other clues.