Long-tailed skipper
The long-tailed skipper is a brown butterfly with a shimmer of blue on its wings and back. Its back wings end in two long tails, like little streamers. It has a big head with big eyes and zooms quickly from flower to flower.
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Fun facts
The caterpillar rolls a leaf around itself and lines it with silk to make a cosy hiding place.
Its pupa is covered in fine bluish hairs.
It cannot live in places where frost lasts a long time.
In the southern United States its caterpillar is called the bean leafroller.
Most asked questions about Long-tailed skipper
?What does the long-tailed skipper eat?
The butterfly drinks nectar. Its caterpillar eats leaves of beans and other bean family plants.
?How big is the long-tailed skipper?
Its wings are about 4.5 to 6 centimetres from tip to tip.
?Is the long-tailed skipper a pest?
Its caterpillars can damage bean crops in the southern United States.
For bug experts
- Scientific name
- Urbanus proteus
- Group
- Butterflies
- Family
- Hesperiidae
- Classification
- Insecta > Lepidoptera > Hesperiidae
- Lives on
- South America, North America
- Also known as
- Bean leafroller
Where the facts come from
- Long-tailed skipper (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 “Jon Zander ( Digon3 )". 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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