Great ash sphinx
The great ash sphinx is a big, soft grey hawkmoth with black dashes on its front wings. One dash runs all the way to the wing tip. At dusk it zooms from flower to flower to drink.
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Fun facts
Its wings can be up to 13 centimetres across.
Its caterpillar is usually light green with blue dashes and a bluish-green horn at the back. A few are red.
When it has finished eating, the caterpillar digs into the soil and turns into a pupa in an underground room.
The pupa rests underground until the next year.
Most asked questions about Great ash sphinx
?What does the great ash sphinx caterpillar eat?
Leaves of lilac, ash and privet, plants of the olive family.
?How big is the great ash sphinx?
Its wingspan is about 90 to 130 millimetres.
For bug experts
- Scientific name
- Sphinx chersis
- Group
- Moths
- Family
- Sphingidae
- Classification
- Insecta > Lepidoptera > Sphingidae
- Lives on
- North America
- Also known as
- Northern ash sphinx
Where the facts come from
- Sphinx chersis (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 Joseph Berger, , Bugwood.org. CC BY 3.0 us, 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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