Silver-spotted skipper
The silver-spotted skipper is a brown butterfly with a shiny silver-white patch on the underside of each back wing. It darts around quickly, which is why it is called a skipper. It is one of the best-known skippers in North America.
How fast is it?
Fun facts
Its caterpillar cuts and folds a leaf with silk to build itself a little leaf house.
A caterpillar builds about five different leaf houses as it grows bigger.
The caterpillar is yellow with a dark head that has two big orange spots, like fake eyes.
It almost never visits yellow flowers.
At night or on cloudy days it hangs upside down under a leaf with its silver spot showing.
Most asked questions about Silver-spotted skipper
?What does the silver-spotted skipper eat?
Adults drink nectar. The caterpillars eat leaves of plants in the pea family.
?Why is it called a skipper?
Because it flies in a quick, darting, skipping way.
?Where can I see a silver-spotted skipper?
In fields, gardens and forest edges across most of North America.
For bug experts
- Scientific name
- Epargyreus clarus
- Named by
- Cramer, 1775
- Group
- Butterflies
- Family
- Hesperiidae
- Classification
- Insecta > Lepidoptera > Hesperiidae
- Lives on
- North America
Where the facts come from
- Epargyreus clarus (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 Weed, Clarence Moores. Public domain, 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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