Caper white
The caper white is a white butterfly with black edges on its wings and white dots inside the black. It is a great traveller and flies long distances in big groups. People often mix it up with the cabbage white.
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Fun facts
The female has bigger wings than the male, about 6 centimetres across compared with 5.
The mother lays small orange eggs in groups on top of the leaves.
Its caterpillars eat less food than other caterpillars their size, so they are not a big farm pest.
The caterpillar has a shiny black head with a white V mark and grows to about 3 centimetres long.
Its pupa is white with black markings.
Most asked questions about Caper white
?Where does the caper white live?
In Australia, Indonesia and Melanesia.
?What does the caper white caterpillar eat?
It eats the leaves of caper bushes and related plants such as native oranges.
For bug experts
- Scientific name
- Belenois java
- Group
- Butterflies
- Family
- Pieridae
- Classification
- Insecta > Lepidoptera > Pieridae
- Lives on
- Australia and Oceania, Asia
- Also known as
- Common white
Where the facts come from
- Belenois java (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 Tom Tarrant. CC BY-SA 3.0, 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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