News That Stays News

Cocoon-robbing August 24, 2014

July 17, 2014

Almost as soon as I started out this morning, I saw a golden glint on a leaf. It turned out to be a small beetle, so iridescent that it’s difficult to see much detail in the photos I took. (Or maybe I’m just a bad photographer, but I’ll blame the subject since it can’t object.)

While I was looking at the beetle, my eye was caught again—this time by a piece of white. It was another great find—a moth that looked like it was made from snowy owl feathers.

I went to pick it up, to see if its legs and body were as soft as they looked, but found that the moth was otherwise engaged. Part of the white mass was actually another moth, and they were in the middle of mating.

Most moths and butterflies have very complex lock-and-key genitalia, so I”m not sure how easy it would have been to dislodge the first moth. At any rate, it seemed rude to try, and I kept my hands to myself after that. The final piece of white in the picture is a cocoon, which one of the moths must have recently emerged from.

The dense texture of the cocoon and the mating immediately after emergence suggest that these moths are related to silk moths (i.e., are in the Bombycoidea somewhere).

Postscript: The next day, the moths were gone but the cocoon was still there. I picked it up—the texture really is unique (and is not transmissible via the internet). However, I’ve been looking through a photo database of the region’s Lepidoptera (http://janzen.sas.upenn.edu/caterpillars/database.lasso) and haven’t seen them yet. So maybe they’re in Bombycoidea and maybe they aren’t. Regardless, the database is fun to play around with, and it definitely proves that anyone who thinks moths can’t be as fancy as butterflies just hasn’t seen the right moths.