Melbourne Zoo’s Butterfly House recently welcomed its half a millionth butterfly.

For more than 20 years the Butterfly House has been a favourite with visitors young and old as they marvelled at the amazing experience of being surrounded by hundreds of butterflies in a lush and leafy subtropical setting.

Every day, around 600 butterflies from 15 different species are on display. The Zoo keeps 10 species on permanent display including Australia’s largest butterfly, the Cairns Birdwing, and one of the smallest, the Common Grass Yellow. There are also five or more species kept on shorter-term display at any one time.

Over the years the Zoo’s Butterfly keepers have bred and displayed more than 50 species of butterfly from all over Australia, mostly from tropical and subtropical regions.

Once the butterflies lay eggs on species-specific food plants placed in the Butterfly House, the plants are moved into a nearby breeding facility where the eggs can hatch into caterpillars.

Although butterflies only drink nectar, in their caterpillar phase they are voracious creatures that munch their way through more than 4,500 specially grown plants a year. That’s more than 90,000 plants since the Butterfly House opened in 1985.