How Do Butterflies Taste Their Food?

Butterflies taste their food through their legs, which have chemoreceptors attached to neurons that can detect the molecules that are edible and those that are not.

When you eat your food, depending on how it tastes, you can quickly decide whether you like it or not. You can thank the taste buds on your tongue for that important aspect of enjoying life (and discerning displeasure)!

Butterflies, however, don’t have taste buds like us mammals. Their mouthparts mainly serve as a straw through which they suck up their food—no chewing necessary. Without so-called “taste buds”, how do butterflies know what is nectar and what isn’t?

Butterflies do taste their food, but not through their mouthparts. Instead, they do it through their feet! Having an animal’s feet serve as taste organs sounds preposterous, this is probably why researchers never even considered the possibility.

Most early research in the field looked at the antenna or the palpi, part of the butterfly mouthparts, as the primary taste organs. The thinking was that if humans and most other mammals had a tongue for taste, a similar organ must serve the same function in insects.