Friday 15 July 2011

Where's the moth?


Moths are masters of camouflage and here is a Marbled Beauty to give us a lesson. Now you see it - below. Now you don't, or hardly - above. It's also a moth with a fondness for old buildings according to the experts; presumably plenty of crumbling plaster and flaking window frames can help it to hide.



This morning's other little star is this beautiful Tortrix moth, a micro which deserves the term as my special Penny Wainwright Pencil Scale shows. After much Google-imaging, I am pretty sure that it is Acleris forsskaleana whose surname intrigued me, so I clicked and Wiki-ed on.


It's worth reading the entry on Pehr Forsskal, whose name was given to the moth by Linnaeus himself, who also Christened a plant after the young Finn because it was similarly tenacious and stubborn. Forskkal seems to have been an all-round good egg, writing a Treatise on Civil Liberty which the Swedish authorities promptly suppressed. Here's a Wiki-pic of him looking tenacious but nice. What on earth would the moth make of all this?

2 comments:

Bennyboymothman said...

Thanks for the extra information about Acleris forsskaleana, you learn something new every day!

MartinWainwright said...

Hi Ben!

Well, I learn a lot from you!

I'm fascinated by the names/ There is a book about them but it's very expensive and you can mostly track things down on Google.

Maybe you'll have a moth named after you one day. I will definitely back such a proposal

all warm wishes as ever

M