Mindo Butterfly Gardens: A Living Rainbow
Mindo's butterfly gardens — several managed enclosures where cloud forest butterflies live, breed, and feed — are the easiest way to experience Ecuador's extraordinary butterfly diversity at close range; the blue morpho, the glasswing, and the owl butterfly are all found here
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Blue Morpho Butterfly
The blue morpho - with its iridescent electric-blue wings (up to 20 cm in diameter) - is the most spectacular butterfly in Mindo gardens; the blue color is structural, not pigment-based - small scales act as diffraction gratings; the appearance and disappearance of the butterfly in flight is astounding
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Glasswing Butterfly
The glass-winged butterfly (Greta oto) — with transparent wings that reveal the background through them — is one of nature's strangest animals; the transparency is an adaptation that makes the wings almost invisible to predators in the dappled light of the cloud forest
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Owl Butterfly
The owl butterfly – with its enormous eyespot pattern that mimics an owl's face – uses bluff to protect itself from predators; the eyespot is on the underside of the wing and appears when the butterfly lands and spreads its wings; facial expressions are remarkably convincing
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Butterfly Life Cycle Display
Mindo Butterfly Gardens maintains all stages of the butterfly's life cycle - the leaf-cutting caterpillars, the chrysalises that form in the nursery and the newly emerged adults that inflate their wings; the emergence of a new butterfly from its chrysalis is one of nature's most compelling transformations
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Cloud Forest Plant Relations
The butterfly gardens show the plant-butterfly relationships in the cloud forest - each butterfly species has specific host plants for its larvae; the passion plants of the Passifloraceae family host Heliconius butterflies; the ecological knowledge embedded in the gardens is significant
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Moths
The Mindo cloud forest has an extraordinary diversity of moths - the sphinx moths (which pollinate plants at night), the geometric moths with their intricate wing patterns and the saturniid silk moths are as spectacular as the day-flying butterflies; night walks at Mindo lodges regularly encounter magnificent moths