Like a moth to a name

The "Crusader Moth" we blogged about on Sunday is a Clymene Moth (Haploa clymene), our Mississippi State correspondent Bob Patterson informs us.

We've got the goods on that "Crusader Moth" we found "pinned" to the wall by a spider in a remote corner of Goomp's side porch last weekend (above), thanks to Bob Patterson, webmaster of the North American Moth Photographers Group of the Mississippi Entomological Museum at Mississippi State University. Their mission statement :

The Moth Photographers Group exists as a non-profit, self-help organization for the purpose of aiding nature photographers and others in the identification of moths. The ultimate aim of the organization is to make available on the Internet photographs of a high percentage of the moths occuring in North America.

Looking to identify our moth, we started googling this morning and soon stumbled onto the NAMPGs "Digital Guide to Moth Identification." We sent them a square-format photograph, and in the flash of a moth's wings (see below), back came word that our camera had caught an image of a Clymene Moth (Haploa clymene) with wings folded.

Bob's Clymene Moth flashed a bit of ankle when he clicked the shutter.

Like the Ultronia Underwing and the Io Moth -- blogged here and here -- the Clymene has a surprise for would-be predators.

We tried inverting Bob's photograph and found a completely different-looking "creature with eyes," akin to the difference discussed in our post "It's not all about us."

Comparing Bob's image of a presumably live -- or at least arranged in a naturalistic pose -- moth in action with the traditional lepidopterist's spread-eagle corpses laid out with mounting pins, we couldn't help but notice that Bob's work -- not to mention that of the spider who had "pinned" its prey to Goomp's porch wall with silk -- conveyed so much more information about the dynamics of Darwin's "natural selection."

Comments

[goomp]

A most interesting find. With the hundreds of kinds of moths it is lucky to have a group such as the Photographers to which one can refer. I do still prefer the name Crusader even if it is not official.