Marbled beauty
The marbled beauty is a small moth with white wings covered in grey squiggles, like a piece of marble. When it sits on a lichen-covered wall or tree, it almost disappears. It flies at night in summer and comes to lamps.
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Fun facts
In cities, many marbled beauties are darker. Dark moths hide better on dirty walls, so more of them survive there.
Some of them have bright orange or yellow markings on their wings.
Its caterpillar is bluish grey with orange marks on its back, and it spends the winter as a caterpillar.
It is probably the most common lichen-eating moth in Europe and northern Asia.
It can live high up in the Alps, more than 2000 metres above the sea.
Most asked questions about Marbled beauty
?What does the marbled beauty eat?
Its caterpillars eat only lichens, which grow on walls, rocks and trees.
?How big is the marbled beauty?
Its wings measure about 22 to 30 millimetres from tip to tip.
For bug experts
- Scientific name
- Bryophila domestica
- Named by
- Hufnagel, 1766
- Group
- Moths
- Family
- Noctuidae
- Classification
- Insecta > Lepidoptera > Noctuidae
- Lives on
- Europe
Where the facts come from
- Marbled beauty (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 Ben Sale from Stevenage, UK. CC BY 2.0, Wikimedia Commons. The sticker of this bug is drawn from this 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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