Large tabby
The large tabby is a grey-brown moth sprinkled with dark specks, a bit like a tabby cat. Its caterpillars have a very strange meal. They eat animal fat, which is why it is also called the grease moth.
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Fun facts
Its caterpillars are blackish or dark brown and spin silk tunnels in heaps of old hay and chaff.
Carl Linnaeus described it in 1758, in the famous book where he gave scientific names to thousands of animals.
People accidentally carried it to North America and New Zealand.
Most asked questions about Large tabby
?What does the large tabby eat?
Its caterpillars eat animal fats. They live among old hay and chaff.
?Why is it called the grease moth?
Because its caterpillars feed on fat and grease.
For bug experts
- Scientific name
- Aglossa pinguinalis
- Named by
- Linnaeus, 1758
- Group
- Moths
- Family
- Pyralidae
- Classification
- Insecta > Lepidoptera > Pyralidae
- Lives on
- Europe, Asia, North America, Australia and Oceania
- Also known as
- Grease moth
Where the facts come from
- Aglossa pinguinalis (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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