Category: Lepidoptera

Last night was a very different night  of mothing. It had been up to 20 degrees Celsius during the day but got down as low as 7 degrees Celsius in the night, it was still and dry, with a waxing gibbous moon. The haul one gets to an actinic light moth trap can never be predicted, but numbers were the highest they had been since the warm patch in April 2019, it’s now mid-May 2019.

I was very pleased to see one of the larger British moths sitting on the outside of the trap this morning, the very furry Puss Moth, Cerura vinula. This specimen was an impressive 4.5 centimetres long from front leg to wingtip and has the most striking patterning.

As you can see from my photos it is very furry, has broad white wings. The forewings have very dark concentric lines that look like indentations, there are dark cross veins on the wings and bronze lines radiating down the thorax. This specimen also has a greenish hue to its heads and black spots. Gently coaxing it from the trap into an examination pot was quite an eerie feeling, the large size and furriness make you think you’re handling a small, alien-looking mammal, rather than an insect.

Also new for me, potted as it approached the trap last night was a Coxcomb Prominent, Ptilodon capucina, a species common from Ireland to Japan in the Palearctic ecological zone.

It was the busiest night for moths in the garden last night for a month or so, also ticked this morning and last night, 12 species, 20 specimens:

Puss Moth, Red Twin-spot Carpet, Hebrew Character, male Muslin (2x), Shuttle-shaped Dart (6x), Turnip Moth (2x), The Streamer, Double-striped Pug, Common Pug, Heart & Dart (2x), Light-brown Apple Moth.

Incidentally, I remember seeing photos of the Puss Moth caterpillar in books when I was a child, it was often the cover star of a wildlife book, for instance. You may recognise it too. Incidentally, don’t annoy this larva, it can spray formic acid at you…

Just added another new moth species to the mothematical list, the Heart & Dart (Agrotis exclamationis). Here’s a focus-stacked shot looking down on the moth so you can see its “darts” and its “hearts”.

Here’s a face-on closeup, also focus stacked using digiCamControl to capture a sequence of six photos at different focus positions, front to back, and then aligning and stacking together with CombineZP. The stacking has not worked brilliantly in this shot, the antennae have artefacts, but at least you can see this species’ distinctive black band visible only when looking at the front of the thorax head-on.

Apparently, the Heart & Dart is one of the most common of the so-called owlets, the Noctuid moths, common in Europe and widespread in the UK, attracted to light and its larvae (known as cutworms in this genus of moths). The larvae eat all sorts of garden and wild plants, turnip, potatoes, maize, spinach, strawberries, lettuce, beetroot, as well as oak leaves and brambles.

The moth’s common name is perhaps obvious, but so too, in some sense, is the scientific binomial: Agrotis from the Greek for farmer, exclamationis meaning an exclamation! A farmer’s exclamation. Not a species to be encouraged in one’s new #AllotmentLife.

Of course, some cultures get their own back on the plant-eating moths, by eating the moths themselves. The related Bogong moth (Agrotis infusa) is an icon of Australian wildlife due to its historical role as a food source for Aboriginal people of Southeastern Australia, Its gathering led to inter-tribal feasting. The moths are roasted to remove wings and scales and often made into moth meat paste, which apparently has a nice, nutty taste.

Another one of those insects almost everyone else thinks of as grey or brown…just look at that pure greeeen.

Light Emerald (Campaea margaritaria). This is a geometer moth, which means its larvae “measure the earth”, they’re inchworms, in other words. Although I think it’s time they went metric AND they’re not worms…they’re larvae (moth caterpillars).

Although this moth is pretty much flat, I took three photos of it at different focus depths and then aligned and stacked them together (using digiCamControl and CombineZP, mentioned as my current free tools of choice for focus stacking some time ago on the blog.)

If you look closely you can see why moths and butterflies (essentially the same thing) are called Lepidoptera. (Lepis means scale, pteron means wing in ancient Greek, so – scaly wings)

The Maiden’s Blush moth, Cyclophora punctaria, Spring form is not as well marked as the Summer form where the blush is more obvious, but you can still see it here.

This species is a geometer moth, which means its larvae (caterpillars) move in such a manner that they seem to measure the earth, they’re known as inchworms in the USA and elsewhere. Specifically, this member of the Geometridae is a member of the sub-family Sterrhinae, which includes the “Least Carpet” and several “Wave” moths as well as the “Blood-veins”. The species was first described by Carl Linnaeus in 1758 in the 10th edition of Systema Naturae.

According to the UK Moths site, the species occurs in oak woodland, its larvae feeding on that tree. It is fairly common in the south of England, but scarcer up north and into Scotland. As with several other moths in the genus Cyclophora, in Western Europe it flies in the spring/early summer (May to June) and then has a second brood in August. The adults of the second brood are markedly smaller than the spring specimens.

This specimen of Maiden’s Blush flew to 40W actinic light trap overnight 24/25 April 2019. Along with a host of other moths: Brimstone, Muslin, Garden Carpet, Early Grey, Spectacle, Nutmeg, Powdered Quaker (another new for me pictured below), Shuttle-shaped Dart (6 of them).

You will not that I have called this post “Moth of the month”, don’t worry there will be more moths than once a month…

I’m slowly seeing new moths to my actinic light trap as the spring surges forward, a new one or two each day now. But, one of the stalwarts of the British mothing world posts to the major Facebook mothing group how he had almost 300 different moths to his trap, with 50+ species new for the year. I’m not sure I could cope and certainly wouldn’t be able to identify from memory all of the ones he cited.

My “haul” from last night was a lot more modest but interesting nevertheless…and manageable:

Shuttle-shaped Dart (7)
Male Muslin moths (3)
Double-striped Pug (2)
Brimstone
Hebrew Character
Common Plume
Waved Umber
The Mullein
Pebble Prominent
Nutmeg
Spectacle

Recent moths new to my “list” for the year, so I’d never seen before.

You will have spotted by now, my current fixation on the Emperor moth, Saturnia pavonia. It’s Britain’s only resident member of the Saturniidae family (related to the Silkworm moth). I have a pheromone lure that has some (6Z,11Z)-hexadeca-6,11-dien-1-yl acetate on it, which I bought from Anglian Lepidopterist Supplies. UPDATE: As of 2023, fifth season of checking on this species in our neighbourhood, still present and showing.

It took me a while to track down the name of that sex pheromone, exuded by the less colourful, night-flying females, to attract the colourful, day-flying males. I had photographed one or two on the wing but used a homemade butterfly net to catch the specimen you see above. I let it chill out in a pot for a few minutes to get a nice snap showing all of his pareidoliac eyes and his enormous pheromone-detecting antennae without him flapping about.

He’s back in the wild now looking for true love rather than olfactory moth porn. Neither the male nor the female has mouthparts, so they cannot eat, they get all their energy from reserves built up when they were larvae (caterpillars) eating heather or brambles. They have to get it together as soon as they can during the flight time of April to May.

Now, who said moths were grey and dowdy? This is surely the most photogenic moth in the UK.

UPDATE: 9th April 2020: First Muslin to the lure, conventionally photographed from three angles on stone.

The male Muslin Moth (Diaphora mendica [Clerck, 1759]) that I saw in the trap these last couple of mornings was there again today. I know, because he has a little snick out of the end of his left antenna. I was hoping a female might turn up, their wings are muslin-white, but the only other moth in the trap was a solitary Hebrew Character.

Anyway, the Muslin’s arrival gave me the opportunity to try out some more focus stacking. This time I used a couple of free tools. The first a controller for my Canon dSLR, digiCam Control. This software lets you control you dSLR via a USB cable from your computer and has builtin focus stacking (and many other functions).

I used its simple focus stacking to take a focus-bracketed set of four photos of the moth illuminated with an LED ring flash and natural light from my “studio” window (it’s just our back bedroom, which I use as an office). Anyway, each of the four photographs has its focus from near to far away from the camera. So the moth is pin sharp in each photo but only in a certain plane parallel to the camera’s sensor. The depth-of-field is very short with a macro lens at close quarters even with a small-ish aperture of f/9.5.

I then combined (automated process) the four shots using another piece of free software, CombineZP. I used what seemed to be the simplest option “Do Stack” and the resulting composite image was generated in a couple of minutes.

All very quick and easy. I am sure with practice and more attention to the details of optimising each piece of software and perhaps the lighting for the subject, I reckon it would be possible to get even better sharper shots, without having to spend hundreds of pounds on new hardware.

I also did a sequence of face-on portrait shots with the moth, automatically aligned them in CombineZP and then applied the “Do Stack” command, great result.

Yesterday, I had a Muslin moth to photograph. Today, I had another go at focus stacking a macro shot, with an Angle Shades (Phlogophora meticulosa).

Focus stacking involves taking essentially the same photo several times but focusing first on the foreground, then the mid, then the farthest point on the subject. You can take as many shots as you like to “bracket” the image and get a sequence of shots that have the whole of the object in focus at some point in each photo. As you can see in the photo above.

It works best if you set the camera up on a tripod and take the series of photos using magnified LiveView and manually focusing on different parts of the subject. There are automated systems (software and hardware) and some cameras have focus bracketing built in (think of it as the focusing analogue of exposure bracketing, which lets you create high dynamic range (HDR) photos.

Once you have your set of focus-bracketed photos, you can then use a photo editor to blend them into a single composite image where pretty much all of the shot is in focus. The technique overcomes the very shallow depth-of-field you have with a small aperture when shooting taking close-ups. That said, the technique works to extend DoF for any type of photo.

Today’s subject is the beautifully patterned Angle Shades moth (who said moths were dull and grey?). I had it sat in a pot and perched that on an old patterned chair. If I could have persuaded it out of the pot without it flying away, you could have seen better just how well camouflaged this moth is against such William Morris style arts and crafts prints. In the wild, of course, it finds itself beautifully camouflaged among multicoloured and dappled foliage.

It has been a bit quiet on the new-to-the-garden moths, basically because it’s still quite cold and the night-flyers aren’t out in great numbers yet. Nevertheless, a male Muslin moth (Diaphora mendica) turned up last night. Hashtag #floof. Here he is “focus stacked” using half a dozen macro close-ups and Zerene Stacker. The aerial view is a single shot.

The females don’t have the big pheromone antennae and are white with the black spots.

The other moths that are around and that have turned up in varying numbers in the last month or so include: Common Quaker, Small Quaker, Twin-spotted Quaker, Hebrew Character, Clouded Drab, Early Grey, Twenty Plume, Common Plume, Early Thorn, Garden Carpet, Nut-tree Tussock, Agonopterix yeatiana, March Moth, The Chestnut, Double-striped Pug, March Dagger, Dotted Border, Pale Pinion, Oak Beauty, Pale Brindled Beauty, Acleris cristana.

Photos of all these updated with the new entries can be found in my Mothematics gallery on Imaging Storm, also includes butterflies, but they’re really just a type of moth, anyway.