A cocoon is distinct from both a pupa and chrysalis. It is a hard, silk shell that a moth larva weaves around itself before it enters the pupa stage of metamorphosis.

If butterflies are the beauty queens of the insect world, moths are their drab and pesky cousins—or so you may have thought. It’s true that most moths are nocturnal, so you’re more likely to ...

Gypsy moths also have a big appetite for sex. And unprotected moth sex leads to caterpillars, which have stripped oak trees and other hardwoods of their leaves in Southwest Virginia and beyond.

In about ten days after this last change takes place, the chrysalis works itself almost entirely out of the cocoon, and the little moth represented at Fig. 1, a, makes its escape.