An old frenemy returns to the apartment stairwell. Meal moth, Pyralis farinalis.
Posts Tagged 'moths'
I am very much looking forward to David Beadle and Seabrooke Leckie’s new field guide to moths.
Perched briefly on a window, this moth gives us a nice view of its (rarely seen) underside.
Checking out of our fog-bound Catskills hotel, we were greeted with a luna moth on the veranda. One of the giant silk moths, Actias luna is large, startling, and spectacular. (See the comments for the status of these show-stoppers here in the city.) 
Wingspan ranges from 3-4″ in length. Each of the four wings has an eyespot; the hindwings spots here are just visible through the forewings. The streamer-like tails of the hindwings are like curling silk.
Note the loops of the feathery antennae, above, and the white underline in the eyespots, below (click on image to open to bigger view). 
Later in the day, when we took shelter from a downpour, we found another luna hanging onto the wall of a campground restroom. Like the first, it had been attracted to the structure’s light. 
The Catskills ~ Day I
Published June 14, 2011 Fieldnotes 2 CommentsTags: birding, birds, Catskills, moths
Four of us journeyed up to the Catskills this past weekend, daring the iffy, drippy weather. (Considering it was close to 100 degrees in NYC last week, we enjoyed a 50-degree drop going up there.) On the way up, we stopped at the RamsHorn-Livingstone Sanctuary in the town of Catskill. 
At this Scienic Hudson/NYAudubon administered tidal swamp, we listened to red-winged blackbirds, common yellowthroats, yellow warblers (juveniles were demanding to be fed), Baltimore orioles, and a pileated woodpecker, among other species. An eastern kingbird, its white-rimmed tail cocked upright from the tight confines of its nest, was the first of several nesting species noted.
Then we drove up into the Catskills Mountains themselves, through the Kaaterskill Clove on route 23A. Clouds hung heavily over the tops of the mountains. The short hike up to Kaaterskill Falls (photo at the top), that most famous of Hudson River School sights, was wonderfully mossy, fungal, and ferny. Here’s what the surrounds looked like:
Gold in them thar hills? A Gold-backed snipe fly, Chrysopilus thoracicus, along the Kaaterskill Falls trail:
We saw our first raven of the weekend flying overhead when we came down from the Falls. Our boots were stained with reddish slate, reminding us of the color of “brownstone.”
Our lodging for the evening was in East Windham, where five states can be seen. On a clear day. We, however, were fogged in and barely saw New York below us. The hotel’s lights, meanwhile, sucked moths from the dark:
Paonias exaecatus, the blinded sphinx moth.
Lophocampa caryae, hickory tussock moth.
One of the Nemoria species of moths, known as the emeralds.
During the trip, we saw the usual slaughter of road kill. (In fact, unfortunately, we couldn’t avoid killing a chipmunk.) One of side-of-the-road bodies we saw was a coyote. Noted alive from the windows were deer, turkey, woodchuck, and rabbit. Higher up: turkey vultures, a great blue heron, and a couple of red-tails, one perched on a bank building above a street festival in one of those cute Hudson Valley towns I didn’t catch the name of.
Insects, spider
Published June 7, 2011 Fieldnotes 2 CommentsTags: insects, invertebrates, moths, spiders
Ragweed leaf beetle.
The woods at Ipswich River Wildlife Sanctuary were dripping with caterpillars, and caterpillar droppings, which rained down invisibly but created a little pitter patter on the leaf-litter.
At Ipswich, I got my first mosquito bites of the year. This one was taken down back in Haverhill, MA. Note how its harpoon is longer than its thorax.
This was quite tiny; it perched on top of a pair of eyeglasses long enough for a photo but not long enough to figure out what it was. A moth?A reader informs me this is leaf-hopper, one of the true bugs (see comments.)
You can see why the wasps and the ants and the bees are all related. There was a stinger at the end of the corpse’s abdomen before I picked it up.
A grasshopper on the road.
Moth on the side of the house at night.
Spider on screen with drag line visible.
A curious reader writes in with images of a mystery caterpillar she photographed in Central Park in mid-July.
Consulting David L. Wagner’s Caterpillars of Eastern North America, a gorgeously illustrated Princeton Field Guide, and bugguide.net, I believe what we have here is a polyphemus moth, Antheraea polyphemus. This is one of the giant silkworm subfamily of moths, Saturniinae, which make substantial silk cocoons, and big adult specimens.
Wagner notes that attempts to use our domestic silkworms in the silk industry have failed repeatedly. After some 4000 years, silk still comes from the Asian-native Silkworm, Bombyx mori, and no other species.
Night and Day
Published October 2, 2010 Fieldnotes Leave a CommentTags: butterflies, insects, invertebrates, moths, Nantucket
… you are the one.”
All these insects were found in various parts of Massachusetts at the beginning of this month. I am unsure of IDs for the last two. The butterfly may be a pearl crescent. The Dobsonfly at the very top was a good two inches long, one of the weird delights brought to a light in the Nantucket dark.
Munch, munch, munch
Published September 12, 2010 Backyard 4 CommentsTags: insects, invertebrates, moths
Friends, gardeners, farmers! I come to praise the tobacco hornworm, Manduca sexta, not bury it. You, on the other hand, may be quick to go snicker-snack! That I leave up to you and your conscience.
I had been wondering why my sweet frying pepper, a first time plant for me, had not made any fruit this year. It took a long time for this plant to get past the transplanting stage, but then it started to grow taller, branch, and open a number of small flowers. I was optimistic, but I got bupkiss, or rather, this caterpillar.
While this eating machine may not be the only culprit, it certain is one of the pests of plants within the nightshade family, Solanaceae. This includes deadly nightshade, but also a remarkable collection of non-deadly, indeed, eminently edible, veggies, like potatoes and tomatoes. (Tobacco, I suppose, is only eaten metaphorically.) A day later, I found an even bigger example of this caterpillar on the tomatoes, which makes sense. The female moth searched out these food plants to lay her eggs upon.
Note here the three pairs of thoracic legs, all clustered together near the face. In the other images, you can see the four sets of anterior prolegs, and bringing up the rear, under the horn, the anal proleg. The eye-like structures on the body are spiracles, or respiratory pores. The white stripes are a good diagnostic identifier; the somewhat similar tomato hornworm has a chevron pattern.
The horn, a characteristic shared by the larval stages of sphinx or hawk moths – of which there are 70 species in the eastern U.S. – is particularly well-developed here. This caterpillar will, after stuffing itself, typically pupate and then emerge as a Carolina sphinx moth. Unless…
I first noticed these hornworms a couple of weeks ago, before my Internet and phone service vanished (fuck you, Verizon). A bit later, the first caterpillar, on the pepper plant, turned out to have been taken over by its natural enemy. A parasitic braconid wasp, Cotesia congregata, uses the live body of the caterpillar as a host for her eggs. Dozens of eggs, which are injected into the caterpillar. The eggs hatch, the larva grow, and then tunnel out of the caterpillar to spin these tiny cocoons. The caterpillar dies a slow and presumably agonizing death, as it is eaten from the inside out.
Ugh.
A sampling of the children of the night, all pulled to the lights of Bradford, MA during my recent week away from NYC.
This last is a giant crane fly of some kind. I only noticed this detail upon examining the image: the two club-like structures beneath the wings. Then I stumbled across what they are, literally stumbled, with my fingers, as I was fanning through Richard Dawkins’ Greatest Show on Earth. They’re the halteres, which “swing like very high-speed Indian clubs,” acting as tiny gyroscopes, helping to stabilize the flying beastie. Most insects have four wings; Diptera, the flies, as their order name suggests, have two. But they also have these halteres, which are descended from ancestral wings; in the embryo, they are wings, until, following gene expression, they aren’t.
