Green Moths
The Bad Wing, Green Leuconycta, and Green-patched Looper are three admirable moths that are outfitted in emerald.
Moths
Wall Watching
The BugLady has been stalking invertebrates that hang out on the east wall of the Field Station lab. The wall is painted cinderblock that warms up in the morning and probably keeps some heat as it gets shaded in the afternoon. Grass grows right up to the edge of the building. The BugLady hypothesizes that bugs can enjoy the residual warmth without getting fried by the sun, because she sees some small critters on the north wall but very few on the bright south wall. She found some familiar faces and some new ones—plant-eaters and an array of carnivores that come to collect the herbivores.
White-lined Sphinx Moth (Family Sphingidae)
White-lined Sphinx Moths can be found from mid-spring until early fall in open areas (parks, gardens, grasslands, scrublands and deserts) throughout North America, from Canada to Central America and the West Indies (they’re also found in Europe). They gather nectar on a variety of “flat” flowers like apple but is able to reach deep into tubular flowers like petunias, columbine, and honeysuckle.
Bugs Without Bios III
As veteran BugFans will recall, there are a multitude of bugs out there that are pretty cute but that simply don’t have much information attached to them. In fact, there are around 100,000 species of insects in North America, and a lot of them don’t even have a common name.
Two More Porch Bugs
Just when the BugLady thought that her Front-Porch-Bugs had called it quits (except for the crickets and katydids), she went out one night with the dog and found these two newcomers, the Goldenrod Hooded Owlet and Wolf’s Otiocerus, sitting inches from each other under the porch light.
Night Orange
The BugLady puts out oranges for the birds—orioles, house finches, catbirds, and several species of woodpeckers eat the pulp. The BugLady guesses that ants, flies and German yellowjackets and raccoons would be the first and most numerous guests at the table, but that some interesting stuff would come to the night-time table.
Two More Moths
The two moths that are featured today, the Walnut Sphinx and the Spotted Thyris, are pretty different from each other—one large, one small; a day flyer and a night-flyer; one from a very large family and one practically an only child; one well-biographied and the other barely known.
Grape Lovers
The Grapevine Epimenis certainly looks like a small butterfly (wingspread about an inch), and it is a daytime flyer in woodlands and edges in the eastern half of the U.S. and into Ontario. Adults nectar on the flowers of a few early-blooming fruit trees like cherries and plums and on sumac, and they like redbud. Grape Leaf Folders get their name from the habit of their caterpillars of folding grape (and Virginia creeper, redbud, and some evening primrose) leaves and webbing them shut. They can become pests in vineyards—high infestations damage leaves, which may lower production, damage fruits, and affect the next crop.
Salt Marsh Caterpillar Moths (Family Arctiidae)
Salt Marsh Caterpillar Moths like sunny places—wet, dry, and disturbed, and can be found from the Atlantic coast all the way to Alaska and the Yukon. The SMC is a very mobile little critter, moving fast and far looking for edibles. The females lays masses of —from 400 to 1,000 at once—on host plants, and she (not surprisingly) dies a few days later. The eggs hatch in four or five days, and the caterpillars hang out and feed together during their first two instars (more than quintupling their size) before going their separate ways.
Hickory Tussock Moth (Family Arctiidae)
Hickory Tussock Moths are active in the daytime. They are found in deciduous woods in a range that runs diagonally across the continent from northeast to south-central—from Nova Scotia and Ontario to Texas and a bit west, nicking Wisconsin. After a male and female find each other in late spring, large masses of eggs (from 50 to several hundred) are deposited on the undersides of leaves. Often, when eggs are laid en masse, the resulting caterpillars also feed en masse. HTMs are leaf skeletonizers (they eat the green stuff in-between the leaf veins).