Common nettle-tap
The common nettle-tap is a tiny brown moth marbled with grey and with small pale spots. It flies in the daytime, buzzing around stinging nettles. Wherever nettles grow, you might find it.
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Fun facts
Its caterpillar pulls the edges of a nettle leaf together and lives in its own little web on top of the leaf.
The caterpillar is pale creamy green with dark spots and grows up to 12 millimetres long.
It makes a white cocoon shaped like a spindle, about 8 or 9 millimetres long.
It flies from May to October, and some grown-up moths even live through the winter.
Most asked questions about Common nettle-tap
?Where can I find the common nettle-tap?
Look around patches of stinging nettles on sunny days in summer.
?What does the common nettle-tap eat?
Its caterpillars mainly eat stinging nettle leaves.
For bug experts
- Scientific name
- Anthophila fabriciana
- Named by
- Linnaeus, 1767
- Group
- Moths
- Family
- Choreutidae
- Classification
- Insecta > Lepidoptera > Choreutidae
- Lives on
- Europe, Asia, North America
Where the facts come from
- Anthophila fabriciana (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 James K. Lindsey. 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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