Canadian tiger swallowtail
The Canadian tiger swallowtail is a yellow butterfly with black tiger stripes and little tails on its back wings. It lives further north than most big butterflies, all the way up past the Arctic Circle. In summer you can see crowds of them drinking from puddles.
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Fun facts
Young caterpillars are brown and white and look just like bird poo, so nothing wants to eat them.
Older caterpillars are green with two big fake eyes, so from the side they look like a little snake.
The caterpillar folds a leaf and ties it with silk, then eats from inside its little leaf house.
Sometimes hundreds of these butterflies gather at a single puddle to drink.
It spends the winter as a chrysalis and comes out as a butterfly in May.
Most asked questions about Canadian tiger swallowtail
?Where does the Canadian tiger swallowtail live?
In most of Canada and the northern United States, even north of the Arctic Circle in the Yukon.
?What does the Canadian tiger swallowtail caterpillar eat?
Leaves of birch, poplar, aspen, apple and black cherry trees.
?How big is a Canadian tiger swallowtail?
Its wings are about 6,5 to 8 centimetres across, a bit smaller than the eastern tiger swallowtail.
For bug experts
- Scientific name
- Papilio canadensis
- Group
- Butterflies
- Family
- Papilionidae
- Classification
- Insecta > Lepidoptera > Papilionidae
- Lives on
- North America
Where the facts come from
- Papilio canadensis (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 Mdf. CC BY-SA 3.0, 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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