Several subspecies are found in the Holarctic ecozone south to Anatolia, Transcaucasus, northern Iran, Kazakhstan, Mongolia, China, Korea and Japan.

[3] P. plantaginis has become a common model for studying the counteracting selective pressures of predation, mate choice, immune function, thermoregulation, and more.

It is estimated that over 250 annual and perennial species of this genus Lupinus are distributed throughout both montane and lowland habitats, with hugely diverse regions found in North and South America.

Eating different host plants can result in different immune function and overall life history traits; one example of this is shown by wood tiger moth caterpillars that feed on ribwort plantain.

[12] The antioxidants serve to protect cells from damage incurred by the creation of free radicals resulting from the encapsulation reaction.

[13] In environments where the pathogen load is likely to be high, the food ingested by an individual moth is important in building its defense mechanisms.

Selection by predation can impact host immune defense, as demonstrated by an experiment measuring the virulence of a pathogen Serrate marcescens in Arctia plantaginis larvae.

In the wood tiger moth, conspicuous coloration patterns communicate a poisonous, toxic, or otherwise unpalatable or unprofitable effect to predators.

In P. plantaginis, a distinct hindwing pattern of bands and splotches of white or yellow on black warns predators of its chemical defenses.

Populations of P. plantaginis, are, however, almost always polymorphic, with males exhibiting varying degrees of either yellow or white melanized banding patterns.

[16] Though the aposematic signal of a wood tiger moth is highly conspicuous against vegetative scenery, its patterning is less easy to detect when it drops to the ground.

Wood tiger moths exhibit a behavior where they essentially 'feign death' by dropping suddenly on to the ground in the presence of a predator and taking on a specific, rigid posture with folded legs.

This suggests that the hindwing pattern of the wood tiger moth can switch instantly from conspicuous to camouflage, which has obvious adaptive advantages.

[17] A 2017 study highlighted the ability of P. plantaginis to secrete two different chemical fluids as defense mechanisms in response to two different types of predators.

Yellow males, which in previous studies have been shown to be less sexually favored by females than whites, tend to be most active at peak female-calling periods.

[21] Wood tiger moths have a limited amount of resources to allocate to different life history traits and adaptive strategies; thermoregulation is an important part of their physiology, especially in the cooler climates of North America and Eurasia.

Thus it is thought that due to the various climatic conditions of populations of wood tiger moth, there are different costs and benefits to produces more melanin, which serves to maintain the global diversity of warning signals that we see throughout the species.

In both yellow and white male phenotypes, individuals with more melanin had a heightened ability to trap heat but an increased predation rate due to its weaker and less effective signal.