Not all the moths we find here come to the trap. This is a Common Marbled Carpet which spent yesterday evening on our bathroom roller blind. I persuaded it outside to avoid a fate like that of the last Caliph of Baghdad who was rolled up in a carpet and smothered by Ghengis Khan's Mongols in 1258. I like this variant because even I can easily identify it; other forms of the CMC are frustratingly like lots of the (many,many) other carpet moths. Penny likes it because of the tasteful way its wing patches co-ordinate with the russet background. It would be very un-Darwinian to suggest that Common Marbled Carpet was aware of this, but ever since a Peppered Moth chose an eggbox barcode to snooze on (see last year's blog, many a scroll-click down), I have wondered.
2 comments:
Hey Martin
An interesting read!
Last year I found an Ion Prominent doing very much what your Peppered Moth did with the barcode, using props to camouflage itself.
see here
http://www.flickr.com/photos/33398884@N03/3120360594/
Its amazing isn't it, I believe Buff-tip is another classic Moth which finds the right type of stick to settle on.
Hi there again! Isn't that interesting, about the Iron Prominent as well? I think there's a book to be written challenging the idea that they don't know what they're doing - bringing in the way they find food plants to lay eggs on as well. Mind you, I'm not a scientist. I failed Physics with Chemistry O Level, badly...
Post a Comment