Green dragontail butterfly
The green dragontail is a tiny swallowtail butterfly with a huge tail. Its black and white wings have pale green bands and see-through windows like glass. It zips around like a little dragonfly.
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Fun facts
Its two tails are 25 to 40 millimetres long, almost as long as its wings are wide.
It beats its wings very fast and darts back and forth, using its long tails to steer like rudders.
Males drink lots of water, keep the minerals and squirt the extra water out of their back end.
It is one of the smallest swallowtails in India.
It almost always stays near streams, in sunny gaps of the forest.
Most asked questions about Green dragontail butterfly
?Why is it called the green dragontail?
Because it has pale green bands and long tails, and it flies like a dragonfly.
?How big is the green dragontail?
Its wingspan is about 40 to 55 millimetres, and its tails add another 25 to 40 millimetres.
For bug experts
- Scientific name
- Lamproptera meges
- Group
- Butterflies
- Family
- Papilionidae
- Classification
- Insecta > Lepidoptera > Papilionidae
- Lives on
- Asia
- Also known as
- Green dragontail
Where the facts come from
- Lamproptera meges (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 (c) Cheongweei Gan, some rights reserved (CC BY-SA). CC BY-SA 4.0, Wikimedia Commons. The sticker of this bug is drawn from this picture.
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