Tailed emperor
The tailed emperor is a big Australian butterfly with bold black and white wings and two pointy tails on each back wing. It is a fast, strong flyer. Its green caterpillar has a head with long horns, like a tiny dragon.
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Fun facts
Its caterpillar has two pairs of long horns on its head, and no other Australian caterpillar looks like it.
Males guard hilltops. They perch head down about 3 metres up in a tree and move their back wings up and down.
In the 1970s it spread further south and reached Adelaide in 1973.
Underneath, its wings have a fancy pattern of red and yellow-brown on white.
Most asked questions about Tailed emperor
?Why is it called the tailed emperor?
Because each of its back wings ends in two pointy tails.
?What does the tailed emperor eat?
Adults drink tree sap and rotting fruit juice. Caterpillars eat leaves of trees like wattles.
For bug experts
- Scientific name
- Charaxes sempronius
- Group
- Butterflies
- Family
- Nymphalidae
- Classification
- Insecta > Lepidoptera > Nymphalidae
- Lives on
- Australia and Oceania
Where the facts come from
- Polyura sempronius (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 Rodney Start, Museum Victoria. CC BY 3.0 au, Wikimedia Commons. The sticker of this bug is drawn from this picture.
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