The penultimate instars develop red legs. The final instar is a patchy brown, with pairs of dark triangles along the back.

The caterpillar grows to a length of about 4 cms. The pupa is pale brown, with dark lines where the veins of the wings develop, and a row of dark spots, one on each spiracle, along the sides. The pupa has a length of about 3 cms. It is formed in a silk cocoon in a crevice on the foodplant or its host.

(Photos: courtesy of Bob Miller and Ian Hill)

The adult moths of this species have brown forewings, each with one wide and one narrow pale stripe. The hindwings are each dark yellow with a broad brown margin. The wingspan is about 5 cms.

(Photo: courtesy of Bob Miller and Ian Hill)

The eggs are pale green and egg-shaped, with a length of about 2 mms. They are laid singly on new growth of a foodplant.

The species occurs in Australia as the subspecies doddi Clark, 1922, which has a convex rather than sinuous submarginal pale arc. The subspecies is found only in

drawing by Lionel Walter Rothschild, listed as Macroglossa dohertyi,
Notes on Sphingidae, with descriptions of new species,
Novitates Zoologicae, Volume 1, Number 1 (1894), Plate V, fig 2,
image courtesy of Biodiversity Heritage Library,
digitized by Natural History Museum Library, London.

Further reading

Benjamin Preston Clark,
Twenty-five new Sphingidae, Proceedings of the New England Zoological Club,
Boston, Volume 8 (1922), pp. 14-15.

Maxwell S. Moulds, James P. Tuttle and David A. Lane.
Hawkmoths of Australia,
Monographs on Australian Lepidoptera Series, Volume 13 (2020),
pp. 173-176, Plates 40, 76, 88.

Lionel Walter Rothschild,
Notes on Sphingidae, with descriptions of new species,
Novitates Zoologicae,
Volume 1, Number 1 (1894), pp. 67-68, and also Plate 5, fig. 2.

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(updated 26 June 2008, 5 April 2020)