Animal · Germany, France, United Kingdom
Green lacewing
Chrysoperla carnea — the name this animal has in the language scientists everywhere share.
The green lacewing is a delicate insect with pale green wings so thin and clear that you can almost read a page through them. Its two big eyes shine like drops of gold, and that is why many people simply call it the golden eye.
Picture credit: Syrio (CC BY-SA 4.0) · Syrio (CC BY-SA 4.0) · Wikimedia Commons
Where does the green lacewing live?
Home: gardens, hedges and sunny field edges.
In the wild it lives in these countries: Germany, France, the United Kingdom, Italy, Spain, Poland, Sweden, the Netherlands.
The short profile
Fully grown: about 1 to 1.5 cm long. It weighs about 0 kilograms. On the menu: insects.
The story behind it
In summer a female lays up to a thousand eggs, and each one sits on top of a hair-fine stalk like a tiny lollipop. The stalk holds the egg out of reach of ants and of larvae that hatched a little earlier. The larva that climbs down is flat, speckled and always hungry, and it hunts aphids with curved, hollow jaws. One single larva can eat between 200 and 500 aphids before it spins a round cocoon and changes into an adult. Grown-up lacewings do not hunt at all: they feed on nectar, pollen and the sweet honeydew that aphids leave behind. When the nights get cold, many of them turn yellowish brown and look for a dry corner in an attic, a shed or a hollow tree. If you find one at your window in winter, move it somewhere cool and dark rather than warm, and it will fly off again in spring.
Find it on the globe
Green lacewing is there as a tiny animated figure that breathes and looks around. From far away the planet is only a blue ball; detail arrives as you zoom in, and this one appears once you are close enough. Open it on the globe.
It sits at its real coordinates, not near them — the same numbers listed in the facts above. Switch off the layer for this kind of place and it disappears again; the buttons for that are down the right-hand edge.
Questions children ask
Why is it called the golden eye?
Its two large compound eyes shimmer gold or copper whenever light falls on them. Up close they look like polished metal beads on a green head.
Where does a lacewing spend the winter?
Adults look for dry, unheated places: attics, sheds, garages, cellar windows and hollow trees. Many turn yellowish brown first, which makes them hard to spot among dead leaves.
How many aphids does one larva eat?
Between 200 and 500 while it is growing up, most of them in the last stage before the cocoon. That is why gardeners are glad to see lacewings and sometimes even buy their larvae.
Where these numbers come from
Every figure on this page was checked against public reference sources before publication. Where sources genuinely disagree, the text says so.
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