Trap on holiday

The moth trap's long holiday continues with lightning forecast for yet another night tonight and my respect for electricity causing me to play safe. But that said, my life is certainly not moth-free, thanks to the eagle eyes of Penny the indoor-moth-spotter and various other family events relating to the insect world.

My first two pictures are candidates for a proposed chapter in my granddaughter's book Emily and Grandpa's Private Book of Moths called Moths Where They Shouldn't Be. That certainly applies to this Common Swift investigating our kettle, which was risking an unpleasant death. Update - Sorry, it's an Orange Swift.  Many thanks as always to Edward in Comments.

Our kitchen has been the principal moth magnet in the last few days with the Common Plume, above, spending an entire two days examining one of our spanking new cupboards. A piece of netting which I sometimes use for jam-making also attracted the Holly Blue, below, just outside the door. It was so absorbed that I had no trouble getting a close-up picture of its lovely powdery-blue underwing, but this species is incredibly unwilling to show its beautiful mauvey blue topwings. In the end, I provoked it into flight and screenshot these stills. Blurry - sorry - but I hope that they give you an idea of the colour which the butterfly is so keen to hide.

It was much easier to get pictures for two new specimens in the granddaughter's Collection of Insects Found Dead: this Peacock and Small Tortoiseshell which had got into an outhouse but failed to find the way out. More cheerfully, I found them while liberating a second Peacock which was fluttering madly against the closed window.  It was tricky to photograph against the light. For your interest, I've added a second picture where I pressed the screen where the butterfly was, illuminating some of its colours but losing everything else in a spooky glow.

My older sister meanwhile sent wonderful pictures from her holiday in France of a Two-tailed Pasha, Europe's gaudiest butterfly. Definitely worth spending 14 days in quarantine to have the chance of seeing something like that. They prompted me to look up my own snaps - the composite pic below - of the only one I've ever seen, on holiday in Croatia. When I mentioned it on the blog back in 2011, a reader sent in a vivid description of watching Pashas and Cleopatra butterflies actually driving swallows away from a muddy puddle where they wanted to suck up the salts in peace.

I won't go into gruesome detail but I am fighting a ruthless war against 'Cabbage White' caterpillars on our Purple-sprouting and kale, as well as nasturtiums which the Small and Green-veined Whites seem to prefer. Meanwhile, the grandchildren have sent me a film of a high-speed Cinnabar caterpillar with its nuclear radiation warning colours. It's poisonous for birds. You can see its few but irritating hairs in the clip too.

I'm not alone in hunting garden prey. I noticed the wasp fighting with something in our veg patch the other day. It flew away after I'd taken only one picture, below, but I think that its victim was very small green spider - Araniella cucurbitina maybe, the Green Orb-weaver.

Fan moth

My electrical caution continues and with good reason. At the end of my Zoom yoga on the lawn the other night, grumbles of thunder were making it difficult to wind down with 'Saraswati Ma' and the first flashes of lightning appeared in the direction of Aylesbury.

Here's the scene an hour later when I carried out a vain search for the far-famed Perseid meteor shower but was rewarded instead with spectacular displays of sheet lightning behind the clouds massed over the Cotswolds. My iPhone has its limitations in such circumstances and it's too late to photograph a lightning flash when you actually see it. But I just kept pressing the button randomly and ended up with all these:

Satisfyingly sinister. In fact, without getting too carried away, not unlike the skies in, say, a painting by Tintoretto, the 'little dyer' whose real surname was Robusti and who was nicknamed Il Furioso because of his vigorous way of painting.  I have just discovered these facts from Google and you may think that I am spinning things out because I have no moths. But I have!  Behold another indoor discovery of Penny's, and a very interesting one:

This is the 20-plume micro, a folding fan of a moth which has the honour of appearing on the back cover of the Micro-moth Bible. The top, very fine picture in the composite is from the totally excellent Nature Spot website based in Leicestershire and Rutland which gets my vote as the best species resource online.  The bottom two are the best I could do late at night in our bedroom which was where Penny found the moth. 

The 20-plume actually has six plumes per wing and should therefore be the 24-plume, but I am not going to quibble. Its caterpillars feed inside the buds of honeysuckle and you have a fair chance of seeing the tiny moth flutter up if you brush past plants at this time of year.

Now, how far do you need to work through this sequence of pictures below to find my second moth?

Yup, it's a Silver Y, as mentioned in my last post. I watched it flying around the last of our peas and sugarsnaps before settling in this position where it is outstandingly well camouflaged. I've often wondered if such an excellent choice of background/surroundings is deliberate and scientific research seems to be suggesting more and more that it is.  Look at this abstract, for example, of a paper about 'visual' senses in caterpillars which do not involve their eyes:

Light sensing by tissues distinct from the eye occurs in diverse animal groups, enabling circadian control and phototactic behaviour. Extraocular photoreceptors may also facilitate rapid colour change in cephalopods and lizards, but little is known about the sensory system that mediates slow colour change in arthropods. We previously reported that slow colour change in twig-mimicking caterpillars of the peppered moth (Biston betularia) is a response to achromatic and chromatic visual cues. Here we show that the perception of these cues, and the resulting phenotypic responses, does not require ocular vision. Caterpillars with completely obscured ocelli remained capable of enhancing their crypsis by changing colour and choosing to rest on colour-matching twigs. A suite of visual genes, expressed across the larval integument, likely plays a key role in the mechanism. To our knowledge, this is the first evidence that extraocular colour sensing can mediate pigment-based colour change and behaviour in an arthropod.

and here is another fascinating piece of research: 

 Bark-resting moths are known for their behavioral background selection for camouflage; they prefer to stay near backgrounds that exhibit colors or brightness similar to their own wing color ( Sargent 1966 ; Grant and Howlett 1988 ), and adopt adaptive resting orientations that reinforce their crypticity ( Pietrewicz and Kamil 1977 ; Webster et al. 2009 ). Recent studies revealed that some bark-resting moths can actively seek out cryptic resting positions and body orientations elaborately after landing on tree trunks by re-positioning ( Kang et al. 2012 ), and they are more likely to do so when the crypticity conferred at the initial landing position is low ( Kang et al. 2013a ). However, previous evidence for this adaptive behavior of moths was based on detection data from non-real predators of moths (humans) and disregarded the specific mechanistic explanations that provided the moths with better camouflage. Here, we use image analysis and avian vision models to identify the concealing mechanisms that are involved in this adaptive behavior of moths. 

I could follow this trail online all afternoon but I have other things to do.  More another time.

Playing safe

 

The nightly possibility of lightning strikes is making me wary about lighting the trap. I don't want to blow up the fusebox and anyway, after the family's holiday here and uninterrupted sessions at the eggboxes, the moths deserve a rest. But here are a couple of leftovers from my recent guest list.

First, a Clay with its sharp little 'eye', a grass-feeding species at the caterpillar stage and very like the immigrant but recently established resident, the White-point. There is another cousin found in the UK, the White-speck which is rarer but has been here once. They all share the scientific first name Mythimna, taken from a Cretan city in prehistoric times, and they have a lot of foreign relations:

Blimey!  Imagine Christmas parties and family weddings. My second arrival is this neat Small Bloodvein, quite a common moth but one whose caterpillar is so withdrawn that it has seldom been found in the wild and its foodplants are not absolutely known.

Moth and chips

Things can be a little drab in the moth trap at this time of year, but here is a run of colour to brighten up your day. First off: a Ruby Tiger being unusually ready to show off the reason for its name, possibly distracted by the intricacies of my dressing gown. Normally, they are very reluctant to display their bright red bodies and knee-breeches and intent on scurrying away to the underneath of their eggbox.

Next we have that common but almost butterfly-vivid caller, the Brimstone. Yesterday also saw an actual Brimstone butterfly out enjoying the sun. If the moth hadn't fluttered off earlier to the safety of a bush, I might have contrived an interesting meeting.

The Orange Swift is a new arrival for the year, a species whose brightest colours are given to the male, as so often in the world of moths where the habits of the human world are turned upside down. It is the males who get the finery to attract the female, who has other, less obvious lures of her own, especially the scents which can bring male Emperor moths, for example, jetting in from over a mile away.

  

Like the similar but duller Common Swift which is indeed common around here, the Orange Swift finds dandelions for its caterpillars, an easy task on our lawn. The moths swoop low over the plant and lay their eggs in flight. I suspect that this small clutch in one of the trap's eggboxes was left by one of them. I will leave them near a dandelion and when they hatch, the little larvae should burrow down to find the roots, on which they feed. If we could increase our Common and Orange Swift population, we might at last solve our dandelion problem, though secretly I am very fond of both the ragged, jaunty flowers and their delicate clocks.

The Pyrausta family of micro-moths produce some shining purple specimens although by no means uniformly. They can be dull or lose their sheen, but this one is in its prime:

It is Pyrausta purpuralis while below, for contrast, is a slightly less purple example of Pyrausta aurata which was also in the trap. The latter is also known as the Mint Moth and both species are fond of mints of all kinds and may often be seen flying around the plants during the day. This habit probably accounts for their colourfulness, a characteristic shared by many day-flying moths and, of course, most butterflies. we've currently got a very nice peppermint soap from these excellent local makers Ray of Soap on the go. I might leave a flake or two out to see if they also attract moths.

The Canary-shouldered Thorn is an old friend to this blog and frequently to be found outside the trap but nearby. Here are a couple of examples from the last few days; one on my pea-netting and the other attempting to return my entomologist granddaughter's inquisitive gaze:

Lastly in this run of bright colour, here are two examples of 'gold-leaf moths' whose wing scales include marvellously bright, metallic markings: the micro Catoptria pinella and the immigrant macro, the Silver Y, which is now thought pretty reliably to breed in the UK and stay with us all year round.

Away from moths but still in the brighter part of the spectrum, here is a glimpse of the granddaughter's Collection of Butterflies Found Dead, a project also started by Charles Darwin when he was a boy, but abandoned because the future great scientist found so few. She has got off to a fine start with a Comma, which pleased her Granny whose mastery of punctuation was cemented by a distinguished spell as Chief Sub-editor of Cosmopolitan magazine. I wish the project success, unlike her other demand for a nursery here of 'Cabbage' White butterfly caterpillars, hundreds of which are threatening our winter brassica supplies.

The whole family meanwhile enjoyed this lively and pun-packed piece of entomological journalism which you can read in full here. I have often mentioned a favourite book of mine on the advantages of eating insects, still available at the Museum of Natural History in London, whose author would have much-commended Nando's for adding this ingredient. Its inclusion belatedly explains the reason for the title of this post. And I will leave you with this intriguing picture of a family of Forest Bugs on the mercury vapour bulb of the trap. This gets warm and - I think, though I have never tested it - probably quite hot, so I can hardly imagine that they sat there while it was on. I failed to notice, but they were in position pretty soon after I turned the power off and arrived to inspect the eggboxes, warming their toes.

Ugly sister

It's a mean thing to say and my soft-hearted granddaughter chided me for saying it, but one of the latest arrivals in the moth trap deserves the title of the ugliest species in the UK. Although a micro-moth, it is large and brutish-looking and its habits are in keeping.

Like a cuckoo's nestling, the caterpillar feeds on beeswax provided by its hosts and its surroundings give it its name of the Wax moth. Scientifically, it is Galleria mellonella and it is much more often found in the South and Midlands than in the North. Beekeepers dislike it greatly because of its ravaging of their honeycomb and I admit that if I had to choose between a wax moth and honeycomb, I would definitely go for the latter.

My next new arrival, below, is also a very large micro but a much prettier one. It first featured on this blog when the same granddaughter found it in her east London garden almost a year before it got to me. But it has an ugly reputation. It's a Box-tree or Boxworm moth, Cydalima perspectalis, an invasive species  which doesn't even get a proper entry in the micro-moth Bible, published in 2012, though the first British record was from Kent in 2007.  It has spread with great vigour and is causing havoc for the country's owners of box hedges who unfortunately include the guardians of many fine gardens and stately homes. Look it up  on Google and the usual precedence accorded to moth ID sites such as the excellent Nature Spot takes a very definite second place to gardening and pest control web pages. As with the Wax moth, it is the caterpillar which does all the damage.

In the world of macro moths, meanwhile, the children's week here has coincided with some interesting arrivals as well as delicious weather. Below are some of the 'New for the Year' crew:  

 Treble Bar - very like the Lesser Treble Bar but I think this is the plain and simple TB

A fine-looking moth: the Oak Hook-tip (male)

And here it is again, showing further similarities to a stealth fighter

And finally, a Small Waved Umber

There's quite a lot more in my knapsack but I'll stop for now, other than to show you a cheeky spider which must have known that my oldest grandson is (a) a fan of vehicles of all kinds and (b) tremendously interested in cobwebs:

Confused (as ever) of Thrupp

Update: as Edward suggest in Comments, this post was intended for the Upper Thames Moths blog, where a revised version of it now is. I am getting old! Mind you, I'm also having to get up early, before the grandchildren, to get things done, so my mind may not be on its usual razor-like form. I'm leaving the post here to remind myself, and also because I don't like deleting things I've published, as faithful readers can tell by my long chronicle of admitted error.  A further update will follow, once the UTM experts have ruled on whether or which of these are Flounced Rustics or Straw Underwings.

Further update:  I feel slightly better thanks to the verdicts of two helpful colleagues on the UTM blog.  One says modestly: We'll see when Dave adjudicates and we'll see how far out I am! Top left Straw Underwing all the rest Flounced Rustic, while the other suggests: Hi Martin, for me the top left and bottom right are FR (with the latter being more typical if there is such a thing), while the top right and bottom left are SU (especially from the bright pale inner edge to the outer crossband and the outer edge with dark inward-pointing arrowheads - although having said that there are SUs where these features are less prominent, but then there is always the colour of the underwing!). Also the top right and bottom left moths are more thickset, like FR.   So I am not alone. 😅   More information as and when.

Hi everyone and thanks in advance for help in sorting me out over these. I gaily went for Straw Underwings but a friend suggests that they include Flounced Rustics.  Or maybe they are all Flounced Rustics. I have looked at them until brown whorls and black dashes spin before my eyes. Sorry!  What I really want is a Silver-striped Hawk moth.  PS Has anyone else found that the new Blogger is giving them the biggest picture size by default? Doesn't take long to adjust, but slightly annoying. Martin Wainwright, Thrupp