The beginning of one of the most amazing stories in the natural world!
Watch this Painted Lady butterfly laying on a nettle leaf.
How many eggs can you see it laying?
One of the wonders of the natural world!
The life-cycles of insects must be among the most amazing wonders of nature - and the journeys that butterflies and moths make from their tiny eggs through the caterpillar and chrysalis stages to the final perfect adult forms must rank as the most miraculous of all insects! and probably the best known.
On this website, we will try to use the correct terms, so the egg is an ovum, eggs are ova. The proper name for the caterpillar is the larva (plural: larvae), and the chrysalis is the pupa (pupae). The adult that hatches out of the pupa is the imago.
The Ovum
The egg is a tiny but tough, waterproof, often frostproof box in which the larva develops before hatching.
Find out more about the Ovum stage.
Caterpillars are eating machines!
The Larvae of Butterflies and Moths vary enormously in shape, colour and the size they grow to, but whether they are the microscopic moth larvae that mine their way through the insides of leaves, the weird shaped larvae of the Puss Moth, (looking for all the world like a cat! - print out a picture - click here), the huge larvae of the Hawk-moths or the large wood-eating larvae of the Goat Moth, they are all basically eating machines!
This strange caterpillar is the larva of the Lobster Moth.
Find out more about the Larva stage.
The Pupa
This begins as a newly altered larva, turns into a highly camouflaged bag of liquid life-chemicals anchored to a plant or buried out of sight, and finally emerges as a perfect adult Butterfly or Moth. It's magic!
Find out more about the Pupa stage.
The Adult (Imago)
During the adult stage, the Butterflies and Moths have to find mates and produce the next generation of insects. Almost all the males and most of the females have wings to enable them to find the correct plant to lay their eggs on and to help them spread to new places, some of them travelling very long distances.
Click here to find out more about the adult stage in the life-cycles of butterflies and moths.
With their wings some of them produce wonderful displays to defend their territories or to court females before mating. To find out more about these displays.
Many species travel great distances - find out more about these migrants.