Mountain ringlet
The mountain ringlet is a small dark brown butterfly that lives high up in the mountains of Europe. Its wings have orange bands or rings with little black dots. It only flies for a few short weeks in summer.
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Fun facts
It is Britain's only true mountain butterfly.
A female lays up to 70 pale cream eggs, one at a time.
The caterpillar sleeps through winter deep inside a clump of grass. Some take two whole years to grow up because the mountain summer is so short.
It makes its chrysalis deep in a grass tussock, inside a loose tent of silk.
Some mountain ringlets lose almost all their orange and black spots and are just plain blackish brown.
Most asked questions about Mountain ringlet
?Where does the mountain ringlet live?
In the mountains of southern and central Europe, and in a few hilly places in Britain.
?When does the mountain ringlet fly?
Only for a few weeks between June and August, depending on how high up it lives.
For bug experts
- Scientific name
- Erebia epiphron
- Group
- Butterflies
- Family
- Nymphalidae
- Classification
- Insecta > Lepidoptera > Nymphalidae
- Lives on
- Europe
- Also known as
- Small mountain ringlet
Where the facts come from
- Small mountain ringlet (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 Joan Carles Hinojosa Galisteo. CC BY-SA 3.0, Wikimedia Commons. The sticker of this bug is drawn from this picture.
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