Oriental leafworm moth
The oriental leafworm moth is a night moth whose caterpillars are very hungry farm pests. The caterpillar is green or brown with a bright yellow stripe down its back and no hair. It munches leaves at night and hides in the soil by day.
How fast is it?
Fun facts
A female can lay 2,000 to 2,600 eggs, in batches of hundreds covered with her golden brown hair scales.
There can be about 12 generations in one year, because each one lasts only about a month.
A moth can fly about 1.5 kilometres in one go to find new plants.
Its caterpillars attack 87 kinds of important crop plants.
Most asked questions about Oriental leafworm moth
?What does the oriental leafworm eat?
Its caterpillars eat the leaves of many crops, including cotton and tobacco.
?Why is the oriental leafworm a pest?
Its caterpillars can eat all the leaves of a crop and ruin a whole harvest.
For bug experts
- Scientific name
- Spodoptera litura
- Named by
- Fabricius, 1775
- Group
- Moths
- Family
- Noctuidae
- Classification
- Insecta > Lepidoptera > Noctuidae
- Lives on
- Asia, Australia and Oceania
- Also known as
- Tobacco cutworm, Cotton leafworm
Where the facts come from
- Spodoptera litura (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 Donald Hobern from Copenhagen, Denmark. CC BY 2.0, Wikimedia Commons. The sticker of this bug is drawn from this picture.
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