Australian painted lady
The Australian painted lady is an orange-red and black butterfly with white spots on its wing tips. On its back wings it has little eye spots with blue middles. It is a close cousin of the painted lady that lives all over the world.
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Fun facts
Every spring, lots of them fly south together from the north of Australia.
Winds from the west can carry them over the sea all the way to New Zealand.
A male waits on a sunny hilltop for a female to fly past.
The caterpillar is grey and spiky. It hides in a rolled-up leaf during the day and eats at night.
Its chrysalis has shiny silver or gold dots.
Most asked questions about Australian painted lady
?How big is the Australian painted lady?
Its wings are rarely more than 5 cm across.
?Where does the Australian painted lady live?
Mostly in southern Australia. Sometimes the wind carries it to New Zealand.
?How is it different from the painted lady?
It is a bit smaller and has blue centres in the eye spots on its back wings.
For bug experts
- Scientific name
- Vanessa kershawi
- Group
- Butterflies
- Family
- Nymphalidae
- Classification
- Insecta > Lepidoptera > Nymphalidae
- Lives on
- Australia and Oceania
Where the facts come from
- Australian painted lady (Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0): what it looks like, where it lives, what it eats, sizes and fun facts, retold in simple words.
- Picture by Rolf Lawrenz. CC BY 4.0, Wikimedia Commons. The round sticker of this bug is cut from the same picture.
If we got something wrong, sorry, we are bug fans, not a science journal. Tell us at [email protected] and we will fix it.
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