Tailed palmfly
The tailed palmfly is a butterfly from South India with a little tail on each back wing. Males and females look so different that you might think they are two different butterflies. Both of them dress up to look like other butterflies.
How fast is it?
Fun facts
The male is black with small blue patches and looks like a crow butterfly. The female looks like a tiger butterfly.
The caterpillar is bright green with yellow stripes and spots. It has two horns on its head and two long spines at its tail end.
The pupa hangs by its tail but stays stiffly sideways. It is bright green with yellow spots edged in red.
It lives only in South India and nowhere else in the world.
Most asked questions about Tailed palmfly
?What does the tailed palmfly eat?
Its caterpillars eat the leaves of palm trees, such as coconut palms.
?Where does the tailed palmfly live?
Only in South India.
For bug experts
- Scientific name
- Elymnias caudata
- Group
- Butterflies
- Family
- Nymphalidae
- Classification
- Insecta > Lepidoptera > Nymphalidae
- Lives on
- Asia
Where the facts come from
- Elymnias caudata (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 Jeevan Jose, Kerala, India. CC BY-SA 4.0, Wikimedia Commons. The sticker of this bug is drawn from this picture.
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