Nature · Insects & other invertebrates

Death's-head hawkmoth

Immigrant, chiefly August–October · wingspan 90–130 mm

Acherontia atropos — Sphingidae (hawkmoths)

A huge, heavy-bodied immigrant hawkmoth bearing a pale skull-shaped mark on its furry brown thorax. It is the moth that squeaks: disturbed, it forces air out through its short proboscis to make an audible chirp, unique among British Lepidoptera. It also raids honeybee colonies, walking in to drink honey while chemically disguised against attack. It reaches Britain from Africa and the Mediterranean in small numbers each year, and its caterpillars, found on potato haulm, are among the largest seen here.

How to spot them

▸A pale skull-and-crossbones pattern on a dark furry thorax
▸Abdomen banded black and yellow-ochre with a broad blue-grey dorsal stripe; hindwings ochre-yellow with two black bands
▸Squeaks or chirps audibly when handled — no other British moth does
▸Enormous caterpillar, yellow-green or brown, with purple-blue diagonal side stripes and a curled, granular tail horn, on potato
▸Very large and stout even for a hawkmoth; comes to light in late summer and autumn

How to know it

Wears a pale skull on its thorax and squeaks aloud when handled, by forcing air out through its short proboscis

Death's-head hawkmoth — the only British moth with an audible defensive call.

Walks into honeybee colonies to drink honey, protected by a chemical disguise that keeps the workers from stinging it

Death's-head hawkmoth, a hive raider with a thick cuticle and appeasing scent.

Its generic name is the river of the underworld and its epithet one of the three Fates, the one who cuts the thread

Death's-head hawkmoth — Acherontia atropos, from Acheron and Atropos.

Its huge caterpillar is a potato-field insect in Britain, found on the haulm of Solanaceae

Death's-head hawkmoth — larvae also eat woody nightshade and other nightshades.

It appears in Bram Stoker's Dracula, in a Poe story, and across the poster for The Silence of the Lambs

Death's-head hawkmoth — the moth on that poster carries Salvador Dalí's skull of naked women.

An immigrant to Britain from Africa and the Mediterranean, arriving mainly in late summer and autumn

Death's-head hawkmoth, which cannot survive a British winter.

Quick-fire facts

•Acherontia atropos: Acheron is a river of the Greek underworld, and Atropos is the Fate who cuts the thread of life
•Its squeak is made by drawing air in and expelling it through the short proboscis, while a flap in the pharynx vibrates; it is loud enough to hear across a room
•It enters honeybee nests to feed on honey; its cuticle resists stings and it produces chemicals that mask its scent from the bees
•Larval foodplant in Britain is chiefly potato; elsewhere it uses many nightshades and also verbenas and buddleia
•Wingspan up to about 130 mm, making it among the largest moths ever recorded in Britain
•It is a regular but scarce immigrant; larvae are sometimes found and can be reared to adults, but no British population persists
•It featured on the poster for The Silence of the Lambs (1991) and in Bram Stoker's Dracula (1897); Edgar Allan Poe's The Sphinx turns on a hawkmoth of this kind
•Two sister species, Acherontia styx and Acherontia lachesis, carry the same skull mark in Asia — all three genus- and species-names come from Greek death myth

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Sources

Butterfly Conservation — Death's-head Hawk-moth
Paul D. Brock — Britain's Insects: A Field Guide to the Insects of Great Britain and Ireland