page_title: Queen (butterfly)
section_title: Caterpillar
hierarchical_section_title: Queen (butterfly) / Life cycle and morphology / Caterpillar
caption_attribution_description: Photo courtesy of Michele Kelley.
context_page_description: The queen butterfly is a North and South American butterfly in the family Nymphalidae with a wingspan of 70–88 mm. It is orange or brown with black wing borders and small white forewing spots on its dorsal wing surface, and reddish ventral wing surface fairly similar to the dorsal surface. The ventral hindwings have black veins and small white spots in a black border. The male has a black androconial scent patch on its dorsal hindwings. It is found throughout the tropics and into the temperate regions of the Americas, Asia and Africa. It can be found in meadows, fields, marshes, deserts, and at the edges of forests.
  This species is possibly a close relative to the similarly colored soldier butterfly; in any case, it is not close to the plain tiger as was long believed. There are seven subspecies.
  Females lay one egg at a time on larval host plants. Larvae use these plants as a food source, whereas adult butterflies feed mainly on nectar from flowers. Unpalatability to avian predators is a feature of the butterfly; however, its level is highly variable.
context_section_description: Comparatively, the mature queen caterpillar is darker and not as brightly colored as the monarch. It is nearly identical to the caterpillars of Danaus chrysippus  
  
  In the larval stage, the queen is a bluish white, with a reddish-brown underside. It has three pairs of black, fleshy tentacles—one is on the head, one is on the second thoracic segment and one is on the eighth abdominal segment—but lack spines. When mature, the caterpillar is brown with purplish prolegs. The caterpillar has been observed in the following transverse stripes: blue, green, yellow, white, and blackish brown. The head is black with white rings. There is no hair on the body of the caterpillar.
caption: Size comparison between a queen caterpillar, a  monarch caterpillar and a  black swallowtail caterpillar.
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