The young caterpillars mine the leaves and eat the flesh, leaving the skin intact, which is transparent and looks like small windows in the leaves. More mature caterpillars each live under a leaf in a silk shelter.

(Photo: courtesy of CSIRO/BIO Photography Group, Centre for Biodiversity Genomics, University of Guelph)

The adult moth has brown forewings, each with black and white patches, and two pale bent stippled transverse bands. The hindwings are brown, each with an irregular white patch and a white submarginal line. The moth has a wingspan of about 1 cm.

The species has been found all across the old world, for example :

as well as in Australia in

(Photo: courtesy of Dianne Clarke, New Zealand)

Further reading :

Ian F.B. Common,
Moths of Australia,
Melbourne University Press, 1990, fig. 28.14, pp. 292-293.

Peter B. McQuillan, Jan A. Forrest, David Keane, & Roger Grund,
Caterpillars, moths, and their plants of Southern Australia,
Butterfly Conservation South Australia Inc., Adelaide (2019), p. 59.

Josef Johann Mann,
Verzeichniss der im Jahre 1853 in der Gegend von Fiume gesammelten Schmetterlinge,
Wiener Entomologische Monatschrift,
Volume 1 (1857) p. 181.

Paul Zborowski and Ted Edwards,
A Guide to Australian Moths,
CSIRO Publishing, 2007, p. 109.

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(updated 26 March 2011, 16 March 2019, 28 October 2020, 2 May 2022)