! Moths ! Come Towards The Light

I really like that picture of the Euglyphis Iaronia, it looks so fuzzy, almost like you could pet it! My moth inspiration was also a Polyphemus Moth! Most of the moths I like I have never got the opportunity to see in the wild so when it does happen it feels like I am being blessed. Thanks for sharing :)

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thank you for this ! I will look into the links you provided.

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Yes, the light pollution here is terrible, especially since a few years ago the nearby building opposite our backyard put up super-bright security lights, way brighter than need be.

There are some somewhat wilder areas outside of Manhattan, although a lot of the New York City area and suburbs are still too bright. Also we don’t own a car, so I have to get around using public transport almost all the time.

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I saw my first plume moth just a couple days ago! To be honest, I wasn’t sure what I had found until I got home and saw the photo enlarged on the monitor.

My first thought? Whomever the chief flight engineer was on this job, must have been on a bender the night before. It’s very hard to believe such a collection of sticks and torn scraps could ever take off!

https://www.inaturalist.ca/observations/125251779

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My name is the same as a moth genus so I win.
(Amata)

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I regularly LAMP (as I call it), here in Minnesota/USA, and on a whim, I created a Church of Lamp website (ala the Pastafarians, etc.): https://churchoflamp.com/

It’s all in jest, of course, but it’s a lot of fun.

Brett

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I didn’t make a church; but living in the US south where the first question a person asks you after your name is what church you go to, being a cave biologist, I reply “Church of Karst”. It sounds close enough to “Church of Christ” that no one has ever questioned it. Not once.

I love your website, can I join? LOL that is great.I didn’t know that next week is moth week; I’ll have to do a moth night…I think the new moon is during that week, I heard that lunas and similar are easier to attract on new moon nights (is that true?) but either way gonna give it a go…never seen any saturnid, not one. I have found the caterpillers for a few though.

Edit: oh you lost me thanking Edison for lights. F that guy. He stole inventions and murdered dogs.

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Catocala species… easily the best moths!

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Swap out your porch light with a UV bulb and you can get lots more visitors to study right at home :)

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Church of Karst made me cackle. That’s so great.

And yes, you can absolutely join. Please celebrate by holding your own LAMP services and post the results to iNat. And you’re right about Edison. I’ll make an edit to the page on that front. (Not to mention he also electrocuted an elephant.)

As for Saturnids, there’s not a real hard-and-fast way to get them. I have spotted a few (Polyphemus seem to be “easiest”) but I’m still trying to spot some of the others. It’s mostly a matter of the surrounding habitat (areas with host plants = better than surrounded by lawns) and the conditions (warm, dark nights). And lots of luck!

My yard is a case in point: I LAMP regularly here (suburbs of Minneapolis, Minnesota), and I get a handful of moth species each night and lots of other bugs, especially parasitic wasps (NEAT), loads of beetles, and so on. (But I only moth until 11:30 p.m. or so.)

I also LAMP up north (in the North Woods), adjacent to a pretty-much undisturbed swamp, and the mothing there is a lot richer. (I even spotted an Io Moth there!)

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I LAMP on our 50 acres of land in middle of nowhere; which is where I have found Io caterpillers and tulip tree silk moth caterpillers as well. So they are here…just not seen them. I usually set up near where I have seen those too, so they should be nearby!

Huh! My advice is relatively simple: Cheat, and set up a few different lamps in different areas. I’ve started doing that to try out different areas at one time. It’s really nice if you have lots of land, so you can walk from one spot to the next, and in the time that you do so, the sheet is “new” again (or at least there’s enough time for other critters to have shown up).

You could also build a moth trap; those capture everything that lands there and you can go through them in the morning. They have the benefit of trapping all night long. I haven’t done that yet, but I can find a plan for one if you’d like.

I grew up around lots of books. My favorite was (still is) The Wonders of Life on Earth by the Editors of Life Magazine, published 1960 – it was my grandmother’s. Chapter 2 is called “The Stratagems of Defense,” about insect camouflage, mimicry, and warning coloration. Pages 46-48 are a fold-out, three page spread of insects in the Amazon rainforest.


The moth covering most of the left side of the picture is captioned “World’s Largest Moth,” and is shown life size in the book. After I reached adulthood, I found out that it depicts the White Witch, Thysania agrippina. As moths are measured today, it is no longer considered the world’s largest, but it is the one with the longest wingspan, a full foot (12 inches or 30 cm).

I love those Erebids. The White Witch in the picture above is an Erebid. So is the largest moth I have ever seen in person, the Black Witch, Ascalapha odorata. Likewise one of the most colorful day-flying moths I have ever seen, Hyalurga vinosa, for which I submitted the common name Harlequin Moth because I saw it captioned as such in another of my childhood books; I recently published a paper on it in Tropical Lepidoptera Research. Finally, Hemeroblemma opigena and Hemeroblemma mexicana both trigger my autistic visual sensitivity; I have to look at them the same way I have to look at a field of wind turbines or a spinning LED array.

Plus, I think their name is really cool: erebus is Greek for darkness, so erebid literally means “of the darkness.”

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I am so happy today because I found my 100th species for the “Moths of New York County” project:

https://www.inaturalist.org/projects/moths-of-new-york-county-manhattan-islands

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Congratulations!

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Although it is blowing my own horn, I think it’s good work to be able to get to 100 species without ever using a moth light or moth sheet, or bait. Most of the species I have recorded are day-flying moths.

https://www.inaturalist.org/projects/moths-of-new-york-county-manhattan-islands

I am going to try to see if I can talk the Natural Areas Manager of Randall’s Island Park into doing a mothing night in the fall. If necessary I will buy the equipment myself. I would love to see what a moth light could attract in a semi-rich area within New York County.

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Congratulations!! Great news!

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Thanks!

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I was super happy to find a new-to-me Plume Moth today. I also almost never see them.

I think it is the Morning Glory Plume Moth:

https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/126375096

medium-1

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Yard moth #99 to #106 showed up tonight, which is crazy. My favorite (the top one):

https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/126438409

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