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Caterpillars: especially Australian ones
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by
Don Herbison-Evans
(
donherbisonevans@yahoo.com)
&
Stella Crossley
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Australian Caterpillar Frequently Asked Questions FAQ page. |
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Australian Caterpillar Identification Page |
Note: that all our pictures have the head to the left.
Did you know:
The fauna and the flora of Australia are very different from those in the rest of the world, and this is just as true of the Caterpillars as it is of the better known Marsupials. With the short history of European influence in Australia and only a small human population, only a limited amount of work has been done on naming and identifying the various species. At a recent count, Australia was home to about 400 described and named species of butterflies, about 10,000 described and named species of moths, and with probably as many moth species again yet to be described.
Of course, the Australian Aborigines knew a great deal about Australian Lepidoptera, and they used several species as sources of food, for example:
Wijuti Grubs, and
Bogong Moths.
see scientific name index here pretty boring, but useful if seeking information on a species for which you know the scientific name |
Most insect taxonomy and identification has been performed on the adult insect forms, the imagos. Collecting and preserving caterpillars poses very difficult problems. This makes the identification of caterpillars difficult. So, only a small percentage of the Australian Lepidoptera have known caterpillars. An even smaller number of these have been photographed, and fewer still are on the web. In an attempt to improve this situation, we have created these webpages with all the pictures and links we can find about caterpillars that occur in Australia. The pictures come from ourselves and many colleagues, from a wide variety of sources, and are of very varied quality. We are still adding more pictures, so watch the number at the head of this webpage.
These webpages would not be so extensive but for the help of many friends and colleagues, whom we feature on our special
 Acknowledgements Page |
 Acknowledgements Page |
We have a separate webpage for each species, and links to these are available from a webpage for each family as a thumbnail picture and a highlighted name. The families are linked from one webpage for the moths and one for the butterflies. We have included lots of pictures of the adult butterflies and moths also, even if we had no caterpillar pictures for those species. In these cases, our thumbnail pictures show only an adult. For some species we have found no pictures at all, but only some descriptive text. In these cases, we show only a bullet by the name, and the name is highlighted as the link. Some species have been illustrated on Australian postage stamps, and some more widespread species of Australian butterflies and Australian moths have appeared on overseas stamps.
Many caterpillars are very fussy eaters, and eat only a very restricted range of plants or foodstuffs. We have tried to include links for the known food sources of the various caterpillars. However, we only list those that we have observed, those we have been told about by other observers, and those reported in the literature. In principle, the caterpillars might feed on anything when nobody is looking.
We have generally followed the nomenclature and taxonomic divisions as used in the recent book :
Checklist of the Lepidoptera of Australia
Nielsen E.S., Edwards E.D. & Rangsi T.V. (Eds)
(529pp + CDROM, CSIRO Publishing, Melbourne, 1996)
See our
Australian Lepidoptera links
We also have a list of some
Overseas Caterpillar and Lepidoptera links.
(updated 12 May 2013)
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