Cinnabar moth
The cinnabar moth is a black moth with bright pinkish red stripes and spots. Its caterpillars are just as eye-catching, with black and yellow-orange stripes like a football scarf. Those bright colours tell birds: do not eat me, I taste terrible.
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Fun facts
It is named after cinnabar, a bright red stone, because of the red marks on its wings.
People took it to New Zealand, Australia and North America on purpose, so its caterpillars would eat the weed ragwort.
Its caterpillars can grow to about 3 centimetres and can eat a whole patch of ragwort bare.
A mother moth can lay up to 300 eggs under ragwort leaves.
Most asked questions about Cinnabar moth
?What does the cinnabar caterpillar eat?
Ragwort, a yellow flowering weed. It eats the leaves and the flowers.
?Does the cinnabar moth fly by day?
Often yes. It is mostly active at night, but you can also spot it flying in daylight.
For bug experts
- Scientific name
- Tyria jacobaeae
- Named by
- Linnaeus, 1758
- Group
- Moths
- Family
- Erebidae
- Classification
- Insecta > Lepidoptera > Erebidae
- Lives on
- Europe, Asia, Australia and Oceania, North America
Where the facts come from
- Cinnabar moth (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 Charles J. Sharp. CC BY-SA 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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