Deilephila porcellus

Deilephila porcellus, the small elephant hawk-moth, is a moth of the family Sphingidae, the hawk moths. Carl Linnaeus described it in the 1758 tenth edition of Systema Naturae. It is found in Europe, North Africa and West Asia, mostly in coastal areas, heaths and the edges of meadows where its larval food plant Galium grows, reaching about 1600 metres in the Alps and Spain and about 2000 metres in North Africa and Turkey; in central Iran and central Asia it lives in open, arid montane forest or scrub. The wingspan is 45 to 51 millimetres and the moth flies from May to July depending on the location. The forewings are ochreous with a faint olive tinge, edged and blotched with pink, and the body is pinkish and variegated with olive. Colouration is highly variable, and the pink is absent in the drier, warmer parts of Asia Minor and Central Asia. The larva is greyish brown or darker grey, lacks the usual sphingid horn and has a double wart in its place, and feeds on Galium and Epilobium. It is often confused with the larger elephant hawk-moth, Deilephila elpenor, which has a thick pink stripe down the abdomen that this species lacks.