The 88 Butterfly: Counting on Survival
Saturday, 21 February 2026
When you look at the butterfly above, what do you immediately see? Yes, the clue was in the title of this article, but we definitely can make out the number 88 on its wing. Found in Middle and South America, these butterflies are, unsurprisingly called mariposa ochenta y ocho (eighty-eight butterfly) in Spanish. Image Credit
Perhaps more of a revelation is that, depending on where you are, you might not be looking at the same species. Just as we have not one “8” but two, so there are two distinct species with variations of the name the eighty-eight butterfly (there are 12 altogether, it would have been more fun had there been eight). Of course, they certainly share one big thing in common, but evolution shaped the wing pattern for survival, not for numeracy (and more about that later).