and has been recorded on other plants including

both in PLANTAGINACEAE.

These caterpillars make shelter by rolling up young leaves and webbing them together with silk. They feed inside their shelter.

drawing by Harold Maxwell-Lefroy,
Indian Insect Life: a Manual of the Insects of the Plains, 1909, Plate LI, fig. 5,
image courtesy of Biodiversity Heritage Library, digitized by NCSU Libraries.

The caterpillars pupate in a sparse silk cocoon in the soil.

The adult moth is brown with darker veins in the wings separating many narrow transparent windows. The forewings each have two or three dark reddish splotches. The moth has a wingspan of about 2 cms.

(Specimen: courtesy of the Macleay Museum, University of Sydney)

The species occurs in across the world, including:

as well as in Australia in

female, drawing by P.A.J. Duponchel, listed as Botys catalaunalis,
in J.B. Godart & P.A.J. Duponchel: Pyralites, Histoire naturelle des Lépidoptères ou Papillons de France,
Volume 8, Part 2 (1831), Plate CCXXXII, fig. 8,
Image courtesy of Biodiversity Heritage Library, digitized by Smithsonian Libraries.

Further reading :

Ian F.B. Common,
Moths of Australia,
Melbourne University Press, 1990, p. 355.

Philogène Auguste Joseph Duponchel,
Tribe VI Pyralites,
in J.B. Godart & P.A.J. Duponchel:
Histoire naturelle des Lépidoptères ou Papillons de France,
Volume 8, Part 2 (1831), p. 330, and Plate 232, fig. 8.

previous caterpillar

Australian butterflies

Australian Lepidoptera

Australian moths

next caterpillar

(updated 3 January 2013, 24 March 2016, 5 December 2020)