First Lep of the Year!

(Lep = Lepidopteran = butterfly or moth. Come on, you knew that, right?)

There is hope for spring yet! In the past week we’ve had more and more migratory birds – sapsuckers, sparrows, Yellow-rumped Warblers – arriving back on campus, and yesterday afternoon I was out in the woods in just a t-shirt, though admittedly at the time I was slogging through a couple feet of slushy snow in my snowshoes. At this time of year, insects that normally might not catch my eye become cause for celebration. Case in point? This tiny, drab moth.

These little critters, each one about a centimeter long, were fluttering over the surface of the snow in the bog. I haven’t had much luck identifying them – there are many, many species of tiny drab moth, and I posted photos on BugGuide and Twitter but people suggested, like, three different possible families – but finding any moth at all feels like cause for celebration after this endless winter. Hooray!

Shall we take bets on what my first butterfly of the year will be? Mourning Cloak, Eastern Comma, Spring Azure?

The Other Lepidopterans

I’ve been giving a lot of love to the butterflies this spring and summer, and not much attention to that other group of lepidopterans, the moths. I admit that I usually only pay attention to moths if they’re big, colorful, or both, but that doesn’t mean I haven’t taken any moth photos lately. Here’s a taste of what I’ve been seeing.

The only giant silk moth I’ve been able to find was a Polyphemus Moth, the same species I found in a Motel 6 parking lot in West Virginia last summer. I love its eye spots. You can see how a bird or other predator might mistake it for a big face looking at them!

I’ve seen several Virginia Ctenuchas around – they fly during the day, unlike giant silk moths – but the only one that held still long enough for me to get a photo was this one, which held still because it was dead. I didn’t know what it was at first, but this was one of those cases where Googling “blue moth with orange head” actually led me straight to the ID.

Another day-flying moth. This one is called the White-spotted Sable. They seem to have a habit of perching on the undersides of leaves where it’s nearly impossible to get a photo of them, so I was happy when this one landed on this clover blossom instead.

I don’t have a moth field guide of any sort – I rely on the internet, with my Kaufman insect guide to point me in the right direction. I’ve heard great things about the new Peterson guide to the moths of Northeastern North America, but unfortunately I don’t live in the Northeast!

Good Omens

While I was out west, most of my possessions, including my car, remained in Georgia. So when it came time to head to Wisconsin to begin my graduate assistantship, I had to first fly back to the Georgia coast and then road trip north. The first night (I stretched out the trip to a week, visiting old friends and former homes) I stayed in a Motel 6 in Charleston, West Virginia. When I checked in the man behind the counter handed me a form on which to fill in my address, and I hesitated. Should I put my address in Georgia, which I had just vacated? My address in Wisconsin, where I had never actually been yet? My parents’ address in Arizona, where I have never actually lived, only visited? It can get disconcerting to not have a permanent home.

The next morning I got up and carried my luggage down to my car in preparation for checking out. As I stepped into the parking lot something on the ground caught my eye. It was definitely not something I’d expect to find in a motel parking lot in a fairly urban place – a Saturniid moth the size of my hand, dead. Being the huge nerd that I am I scooped it up and carried it back to my room to take a photo. I was thankful to have the elevator to myself on the trip up, because I imagine I would have gotten some odd looks from strangers, a young woman in an elevator with an enormous dead insect in her hands.

Later I used my computer to identify it specifically as a Polyphemus moth, Antheraea polyphemus. Long-time readers may be familiar with my ongoing fascination with moths (click on the “moth” tag in the cloud in the sidebar for evidence), and encounters with the huge, colorful, seldom-seen Saturniids, the family that also includes such spectaculars as Lunas, Emperors and Prometheas, always seem fraught with magic and meaning. I’d never seen a Polyphemus before, and what were the chances of finding a creature with such personal significance to me in a Motel 6 parking lot on the edge of a fairly substantial city? The edge of the nearest Appalachian mountain was just on the other side of the freeway, but still. Most of the time I am a rational, objective-minded person, giving little credence to signs and portents and the idea of fate, and yet… it’s hard not to interpret something like this as a good omen.

A Life Cycle, Completed

From caterpillar to cocoon to moth!  After posting photos of Fir Tussock Moth larvae and cocoons, I thought for completion’s sake I should post the photo I took of the adult.  This photo is from a couple weeks ago but I’ve been holding off on posting it.  My coworker who first found the caterpillar I photographed put it in a terrarium to observe its metamorphosis and eventually added a second one, and even though the first one eclosed around the beginning of the month I was waiting to see what was going to happen to the second.

Turned out the second one was a victim of a parasitic tachinid fly!  I did my best to get a photo of the fly that emerged from the cocoon, but even though I popped the container in the fridge to slow it down it still got away before I could snap a picture.  Still, cool!

Anyway, here’s what a normal non-parasitized adult tussock moth looks like.  This is a male – the female have no wings.  (Moths without wings, who knew?)

It’s too bad that the moth only stood still when he was on this unnatural, non-contrasting background, but I’m lucky I got a photo at all considering what happened with the fly.  And I would just like to point out that even though I’ve posted a ton of insect-related stuff this spring, prior to this there have been four consecutive non-insect posts!  I can only resist for so long…

Another Lovely Little Moth

Yes, things have been getting very moth-y on this blog lately, but what can I say?  They’re everywhere and they’re photogenic.

This one is less than an inch long.  Thanks to my favorite website on the internet, BugGuide, I’ve tentatively identified it as Pygarctia abdominalis, the Yellow-edged Pygarctia.  I can’t seem to find much information on it, like what its larval food plant is; maybe no one knows.  Its range seems to be limited mostly to the South – Butterflies and Moths of North America has confirmed records in Florida, South Carolina, and Texas, plus one out-of-the-way one in Iowa.  (None in Georgia, so I’ll be emailing them this photo.)  It turned up Monday afternoon on the front wall of the dormitory.  I love its antennae.

Later today I’m off to Hilton Head to visit an old friend.  Have a great weekend!

Cocooned

There is more Okefenokee magic to come (at least two posts… possibly more), but first, a piece of what passes for breaking news on a blog such as this.  On Saturday I wrote about a Fir Tussock Moth caterpillar that one of my coworkers had tucked into a container with some leaves in hopes of seeing it spin its cocoon there.  This morning the caterpillar seemed to have vanished, and finally, clinging to the inside of the container’s lid, we found this.

Holding it up to the sun reveals the ghostly silhouette of the changing creature within.

No matter how well we understand the process of metamorphosis, it still seems a little like magic.

The Very Crazy Caterpillar

My coworkers have all figured out that I love looking at, photographing, and identifying interesting insects, so one evening this week one of them informed me about a really crazy-looking caterpillar that had been found crawling up the cistern.

It’s a Fir Tussock Moth caterpillar, Orgyia detrita.  (A second, similar species, the White-marked Tussock Moth or Orgyia leucostigma, is more common in much of the country but lacks those orange markings along the side.  According to BugGuide, the Fir Tussock Moth is the more common of the two in Florida, and I’m only an hour or so north of the Florida border.)

Apparently tussock moth larvae can feed on a wide range of plants, to the point of being pests in some places.  Since we discovered this first one, we’ve suddenly started seeing them everywhere.

The adults are drab brown little things, but man, are these caterpillars crazy.  A red clown nose with long black antler-like tufts on either side, and those four white puffs down the back!  The eye-catching shapes and colors must be a warning, because BugGuide says those hairs can cause skin irritation; when I was taking pictures I was careful to keep it on the twig rather than letting it crawl up onto my hand.  Supposedly tussock moths are found in Ohio as well but I can’t remember ever seeing anything like this before.

This one is now tucked inside a container with a supply of fresh leaves, where one of my coworkers is hoping it will spin a cocoon, which would certainly be interesting.  If it happens I’ll post more pictures.

EDIT: Oh, I nearly forgot – congratulations to the winners of the plover ID challenge.  Anne McCormack got that the first one was a Wilson’s Plover right away, and Hannah Brewster finally nailed down that the second was a Piping Plover.  Hannah is a former coworker of mine from the environmental education center in Ohio where I worked when I first started this blog, and seeing a comment from her was a pleasant surprise.

Eight-Spotted Forester Moth

On Sunday I tweeted about having seen a small, interesting-looking moth that flew away too quickly for me to get a photo of it, and my amazement that Googling a shot in the dark like “small black moth with white spots” actually yielded a likely ID (something in the genus Alypia, the forester moths).  I thought that was the end of that, but then today during lunch one of my coworkers came and found me to tell me there was a cool moth on the sidewalk outside.  I love that even among my fellow environmental educators at work I’m the one who has the reputation for geeking out about things like cool moths.

It was either the same moth I’d seen on Sunday or a very similar one, but today’s much colder weather meant that it had gone from manic flight to drowsiness, not moving more than a few inches in the time it took me to go get my camera and return, my leftover lasagna abandoned in the kitchen.

The fact that I’d already looked it up over the weekend meant that I sounded much more knowledgeable than I actually am when I told my coworker, “Oh, yeah, that’s a forester moth.”  Specifically it’s an Eight-spotted Forester, Alypia octomaculata.  If you’re saying to yourself right now, “But I only see four spots,” that’s because it’s sitting with its wings folded so you can only see the forewings.  There are two more spots on each hindwing.  Isn’t it pretty?  As a colorful, day-flying moth, it probably often gets mistaken for a butterfly.

According to BugGuide, this species’ larval foodplants include grapevines and Virginia creeper, both of which can be found in abundance in the forest across the street.  It overwinters as a pupa and emerges in the spring, and those blue highlights in its wings are an indication that this one was fairly fresh.  I hope it makes it through this cold snap!

The Secret World of Moths

Remember this post?  I snapped this photo of a large sphinx moth on the sill of my boss’s office window and posted it to Bug Guide, thinking someone there would know what species it was.  I was expecting that a moth enthusiast would get back to me saying it was such-and-such a common species, and I’d update my original post with the ID and think no more of it.

I was not expecting what happened next.  Warning: extreme moth-nerdiness is about to ensue, so if you’re allergic, feel free to scroll down to the final paragraph.

*begin extreme moth-nerdiness*

Anyway, sure enough within ten minutes someone replied with the suggestion that Achemon Sphinx looked like a close match, and I thought the matter was settled.  However, then more people showed up with more possibilites.  Pandorus Sphinx?  Satellite Sphinx?  They all looked the same to me!

And then the photo ended up getting passed on to some bona fide moth experts: a guy named Bill Oehlke who apparently runs a mail-order moth egg business out of Prince Edward Island (who knew people order moth eggs through the mail?) sent it to a guy named Jim Tuttle, who is the coordinator and editor of the “season summary” (a database of people’s moth and butterfly sightings) of the Lepidopterists’ Society and who literally wrote the book on this family of moths.

Turns out my moth was an Intermediate Sphinx, Eumorpha intermedia, a species that didn’t even have an entry on Bug Guide.  No entry in Bug Guide???  And check out the USGS’s official range map for this species:

Note that there is absolutely no blue anywhere in south Georgia.  I had the first record of an Intermediate Sphinx moth for anywhere in this part of the state.  Crazy!  I asked one of the moth experts if this species is considered rare, looking at its sparse distribution, and he said it’s probably not so much rare as it is under-reported.  It looks very similar to the aforementioned Satellite Sphinx, and when you add to that the facts that these are cryptic, nocturnal species and that there aren’t a whole lot of sphinx moth experts running around looking for them, we just don’t know that much about their range or abundance.

So how did those guys know that this wasn’t a Satellite Sphinx, anyway?  Apparently Intermediate Sphinxes have a scalloped subterminal line, while the subterminal line of Satellite Sphinxes is merely wavy.  I’m not one hundred percent sure what the “subterminal line” is (and Google failed to provide me with a definition) but after comparing photos of the two species I’m going to hazard a guess that they’re talking about these markings:

If you ask me, this all begs the question of how anyone decided that the Intermediate Sphinx is a separate species in the first place.  Here is the paper from 1980 detailing just that.  According to the author, Intermediate Sphinxes differ from Pandorus and Satellite Sphinxes in “size, color, maculation, and genital characteristics.”  What the heck is maculation, anyway?  (The pattern of markings.  I looked it up.)  And without DNA testing, is anyone really sure whether or not they all interbreed?  Search me.

So anyway, my moth sighting is being included in the season summary of the Lepidopterists’ Society, Mr. Oehlke is using my photos on his website, and Bug Guide has a shiny new entry for Intermediate Sphinxes based on my photo.  And me a rank amateur at both photography and lepidoptery.  Wow.

*end extreme moth-nerdiness*

I guess the take-home message from all this is how amazingly little we know about the fauna even of an area as well-populated as coastal Georgia.  We humans sometimes like to think we have everything all figured out, and it’s worthwhile to take a step back and remind ourselves of this.  No one knows precisely what moth species are and aren’t found right here on Jekyll Island!  Forget the depths of the Amazon, someone could launch a research expedition into the forest across the street and probably add something significant to our understanding of the natural world.  To me, that is awe-inspiring.

Lovely Lepidopterans

Despite being incredibly busy yesterday I managed to find a couple minutes to try to photograph the moths and butterflies hanging around the building.  Clinging to the sill of my boss’s office window was a big, beautiful sphinx moth (I’m not certain of the exact species but I’ll post the photo to BugGuide and let you know).  (Update: it was a Pandorus Sphinx, Eumorpha pandorus.  Update part 2: now the moth enthusiasts are not so sure and have emailed the photo to someone who’s apparently an expert on moths of the southeastern U.S.  Update part 3: it was an Intermediate Sphinx, Eumorpha intermedia, the first record of the species in this part of Georgia!  For more info check out this post.  Can I just say again how much I love, love, love BugGuide?)

Of course, after I had photographed and fawned over this creature, one of my coworkers grabbed it and attempted to feed it to Ke$ha, the enormous toad that lives in a tank in our herp lab.  The circle of life, my friends.

The flowers in the landscaping attract lots of butterflies – tons and tons of migrating Gulf Fritillaries, plus Buckeyes, Palmoides Swallowtails, Giant Swallowtails, some kind of sulphurs, and occasional Monarchs.  I’d love to get around to photographing all of these at some point (I actually just a couple days ago made the connection between the small brownish butterflies here and the spectacular photos of Buckeyes I’ve seen; so much for my powers of observation).  However, this time it was the skippers that caught my eye.

Skippers are placed in a separate taxonomic group from typical butterflies, in the superfamily Hesperiidae.  (Gotta love how taxonomists continue to invent terms like “superfamily” and “subphylum” as they try to stretch and twist our traditional kingdom-phylum-class-order-family-genus-species hierarchy to fit organisms’ real evolutionary relationships.)  They do have a different look about them, more moth-like, with smaller wings in proportion to their body size and different structure to their antennae.  This guy is a Long-tailed Skipper, Urbanus proteus, and when seen from the side like this they look rather plain.  However, if you get a look at one’s back in good sunlight, it’s breathtaking.

All of this along a narrow strip of landscaping between a dormitory and a parking lot on a busy Monday morning.  You don’t necessarily have to be in untrammeled wilderness to have an encounter with nature’s beauty, if you keep your eyes open.