Hemileuca nevadensis is also called the Nevada buck moth. Much attention has been given to its relationship with H. maia, the Eastern buck moth. It is not always possible even for experts to tell by looking whether an individual moth is closer to the typical pattern for Hemileuca maia, H. lucina, H. nevadensis, H. peigleri, H. slosseri, H. menyanthevora, H. latifascia, H.. artemis, H. diana, or H. grotei..
Photo from Idaho Fish and Game.
All of these species can be described in almost identical terms:
* Medium to large moths
* Gray wings with a wide white band across each wing
* Kidney-shaped spot about the middle of each fore wing
* Roundish spot about the middle of each hind wing
* Very thick furry thorax
* Long, flexible, often striped, furry abdominal section
* Small flat head; from some angles they may look as if they didn't have heads
* Fly in autumn rater than spring, usually in the daytime rather than at night
* Lay eggs in clusters around stems of trees or plants that will put forth the appropriate kind of leaves in spring
* Eggs hatch into little black bristly caterpillars about the time leaves appear
* Caterpillars molt through five skins as they grow, each skin showing more color and more elaborately branched bristles; color patterns and bristle shape patterns vary
* Each bristle tip contains about as much venom as a bee sting; if tips break off and stick in human skin they may form tiny bleeding wounds that heal only when the bristle tip is removed
* Before pupation caterpillars hide under dead leaves and/or dry soil; they may or may not spin a little silk across this material but don't build complete cocoons
* Pupae are often found with cast-off caterpillar skins still attached to the back end
* Moths live entirely on fat stored as caterpillars and not used up in pupation
Species differences have usually been described with pictures of typical individuals showing that, e.g., Hemileuca nevadensis typically has smaller spots on the hind wings and wider white bands than Hemileuca maia. But in practice there is enough variation among individuals that individual moths have to be dissected and examined under a microscope to be positively identified, and even then some individuals found in places where both maia and nevadensis live are too close for even experts to call.
So what makes them distinct species? Behavior does. The caterpillars choose different food plants when given a choice. Their choice is not a matter of individual whim; each one may nibble on the other species' (or types') foodplant as survival food, but will be healthiest on its own proper food. Diet seems the most influential factor in determining their color. Diet probably also determines the scent the adult moths exude. Humans don't smell the moths themselves, although humans have analyzed some moths' scent and found that it may contain chemicals that can be used to synthesize "clean, fresh" scents used in things like hand lotion. The moths, however, can follow each other's scent half a mile away. They can tell the species, age, sex, and reproductive status of one another. Normally they show no interest in mating with the other species that look just like them, though maia and nevadensis occasionally hybridize. They behave like distinct species even though they look like local variations among one species.
As regular readers will know, H. latifascia, that looks very similar to nevadensis and has been classified as a subspecies of nevadensis for a long time, but it does not hybridize with nevadensis as easily as it does with menyanthevora. H. menyanthevora has been counted as a subspecies of maia but does not hybridize with maia and does with latifascia. I listed menyanthevora as a separate species because enough has been written about its distinctions to make a full-length blog post. I will here consider latifascia as a subspecies of nevadensis because that's how almost all writers have considered it; H. latiascia is not listed as an endangered species. Enough has been published about nevadensis to make two articles but few writers distinguish nevadensis from latifascia. Being both found in California and occasionally found from coast to coast, nevadensis may be our most abundantly documented Hemileuca, yet no online source that Google wasn't hiding attempted to explain what originally caused it to be recorded as a separate species from latifascia.
Some experts, like Alpheus Packard, originally classified menyanthevora as a subspecies of nevadensis, rather than maia. They seem to have been overruled, possibly because menyanthevora has been confirmed only in New York and Ontario. A family group may have strayed into Wisconsin but is not being reported to have established the species as native there.
I will, however, make a correction. Earlier I said that DNA and hybridization studies suggested that menyanthevora and latifascia are more "closely related" to each other than to maia and nevadensis. Legge et al., in this document that Google did not pull up--how recently was it digitized?--in searches for maia or menyanthevora, state that DNA studies did not find a clear genomic difference between maia and menyanthevora, that menyanthevora's close relationship with latifolia showed clearly only in the hybridization studies. This makes the menyanthevora story even more interesting and also shows the difficulties built into writing articles from online research when search engines are allowed to hide 90% of the results of a search. Legge et al. concluded that there seem to be consistent differences in animal populations that are not explained by genes.
Alpheus Packard, who thought it was a subspecies of maia, nevertheless wrote a few pages about nevadensis.
It was recognized as differing from maia mainly in having smaller spots on the hind wings, and by the different look and behavior of the caterpillars. Specimens from New Mexico were much bigger than maia but specimens from further north were not. Some nevadensis have a wider white band than maia normally have, and some don't--it's a continuum.
Photo by Howell C. Curtis. All
Hemileuca species are variable. Individual
nevadensis can have wider or narrower bands across the wings, lighter or darker gray color, more or less orange fur on the body, and also their wing scales can fray off and leave the wings looking transparent. (Packard called the color "Indian red," referring to a kind of dyed cotton that used to be imported from India.) Males have big plumy antennae on their heads; females have smaller, less conspicuous antennae and, though the antennae don't have a knot at the end, are often mistaken for butterflies.
Nevadensis have wing spans between two and three inches, and usually fly in the daytime.
Photo by Nutsaboutkitties. Variations in the sizes and colors of older caterpillars, as well as adult moths, seem to depend more on diet than on heredity or general environmental conditions. Because of this variability, it's hard to distinguish species by looking. The list of
Hemileuca species named and described has gone above seventy, with most of those species being quickly demoted to subspecies or variant forms. When I wrote that 2013 blog post, there was disagreement about the precise number but most sources agreed that there were "more than twenty" species of
Hemileuca. Now DNA and hybridization studies suggest that there may be only six. Or seven, counting
H. menyanthevora. Well, the horrid caterpillars (the word "horrid" came from a Latin word for bristles) have always made most people want to leave this genus alone, but they
are an interesting genus, from a biologist's point of view.
Photo by Mlodinow. Usually clear gray and white,
nevadensis's wings can also be tinged with brown.
And James Lofton even found one that looks as if it were trying to be an understudy for the Acherontia moths in Silence of the Lambs:
The conservation status of this variable, wide-ranging species is patchy. According to Nature Serve, H. nevadensis is believed to have coexisted with H. maia as far east as Pennsylvania and to have been extirpated in Pennsylvania. It's not missed. However, nevdensis is protected by law in Indiana, in Idaho, and in central Canada. Though not protected, it still occasionally strays into New York.
Some, apparently concerned that most of Ontario is free from Hemileucas, believing that Ontario needs more stingngworms, have seriously proposed importing latifascia to crossbreed with menyanthevora in hopes of increasing the range and numbers of the Hemileuca population there:
Meanwhile, across the lake, US scientists have worked on a formula for preserving bacteria culture in a methyl compound, supposedly to control nematodes, happily noting that it kills Hemileucas as well. In view of the Vicious Pesticide Cycle, adding that stuff to the Ontario breeding effort might make Hemileucas a real pest in Ontario. Could the frail menyanthevora, whose adaptation from desert to northeastern wetland habitat seems shaky, such that most female moths are believed to live only one day, become a real pest? With pesticide sprays, stranger things have happened. The main natural predators on Hemileucas aren't easy for humans to see, but with any nuisance species, when you kill the predators, you get a population explosion. Any Hemileuca that shares human habitat is a major nuisance.
Of course, if your feeling is "They're not interesting; they're all disgusting stingingworms and all we need to know about them is how to get rid of them," you're not alone. No Hemileuca is a major threat to crop yields but all Hemileucas go through a caterpillar stage in which they're covered in venomous bristles that cause acute pain on contact with human, All of them are apt to drop off their host plants with all their bristles facing out and sting anyone on whom they happen to land, or even crawl in under the edges of clothes or shoes. More about the caterpillars below.
Whether you believe we should not allow any of God's or Nature's creatures to go extinct, or believe the whole genus Hemileuca should go extinct and the sooner the better, modern science has learned a few things about Hemileuca populations.
1. They generally increase when the species' host plant is abundant and especially when host plants or trees grow close together.
2. All nuisance species populations increase steadily after an initial drop if people try to "control" the pests by spraying "pesticides." Killing most of the first generation sprayed also kills most of their natural predators. Prey species reproduce faster than their predator species, so in the next generation more pests have fewer predators, so the pest species are now reproducing faster than their predators. The local pest species population are, at the same time, evolving resistance to the "pesticide" although increasing levels of exposure make it increasingly toxic to longer-lived animals like humans. This is known as the Vicious Pesticide Cycle and the only way to break it is to live with a lot of the pest species for a year or two. Then nature will start to restore its balance.
3. When a Hemileuca population increases due to an increasing food supply, at first they're under-predated. Then natural predators move in. The primary natural predators on Hemileucas are insects, fungi, and virus--lifeforms smaller than the caterpillars are. The most efficient way to restore natural predator species to balance is to stop using "pesticides." It won't happen overnight, but where the pests are, their predators will come.
4. Meanwhile, humans can help speed up the process by applying sticks to caterpillars and by "collecting" moths. An easy way to collect a variety of male Hemileucas is to find a newly eclosed female, crawling up away from her pupa with her wings still wet and wadded up, and let her stretch out and dry off in a cage covered with window screen mesh or cheesecloth. Males will then gather on the outside of the cage, and can be collected and euthanized. It's not hard to fill a display case with different-looking specimens. Or the collection can simply be burned.
People who want to make sure Hemileuca populations don't rebound keep plants and trees they can eat well separated. Humans cannot easily pick the egg clusters off the upper- and outer-most twigs of live oak or even cottonwood trees, but in most places they can separate those trees from one another by a few different kinds of trees in which birds can perch. A female moth who can crawl from treetop to treetop, hardly even having to fly, is well camouflaged and has a good chance of avoiding predators and producing three or even four egg clusters. If she has to fly past a few other trees to find the next suitable tree, the moth is much more likely to become bird food.
5. There are those who will reintroduce Hemileucas to a place where they have been extirpated. And they'll admit it. Are they humans? Is this a thing humans would do? Well...we are the species that invented pollution, rape, and war. As a way humans harm one another, reintroducing stingingworms to a neighborhood actually seems minor. But very ill advised.
There are those who rear them as pets.
"I felt mild stinging while cleaning their cage," the propagator of stingingworms confesses. Yes. Those brittle bristle tips wear off as the caterpillars go about their business, It may not be only your imagination if you feel prickly at the mere sight of a stingingworm.
Scientists classify the Hemileucas as members of the giant silk moth family. Though far less "gigantic," the structure of veins in their wings is similar to the Luna and Polyphemus. The Hemileucas also share another feature with the big silk moths: they don't eat after pupation. This accounts for the shape of their little flat heads, which contain only eyes, the bases of antennae, and the minute moth brain. The caterpillars are large and extract a good deal of nutrition from relatively hard and dry leaves, but they use most of this nutrition to pupate. Moths store only enough nutrition to allow them to fly for a few days.
Giant silk moths could easily become overpopulated and wipe out their host plants if nature had not stacked the odds against any individual silk moth's ever finding a mate. Lunas typically fly for about as long as the moon is in the sky. Some of the other big silk moths may fly for five to seven days if nothing eats them during that time. Hemileucas have been known for fly for as long as ten days, but they are very vulnerable to predators and very unlikely to survive for ten days
Hemileuca nevadensis caterpillars are most often found eating willow leaves, though they're not monophagous and also thrive on cottonwood and other host plants. Calscape has a list, with photos, of plants they're known to eat in California:
That little flat head contains very little flat brain. When this moth was a caterpillar, dropping out of a tree, curling up with his bristles out, made any possible predator reconsider eating him. (It also made life miserable if he happened to drop down someone's neck, but he belongs out in the sagebrush country and knows nothing about humans.) Now, as a moth, his idea of self-defense is showing any possible predators the part of him they want to eat first. (How do we know he's male? Body color is not always a reliable guide, though the rule is that males have tufts of red fur on the tail end and females have none, but if you enlarge the picture you can see his plumy antennae.) He has no idea how much more touchable, or even edible, his fur is than his bristles used to be.
Photo by Aaron. There may be some justification for this mostly counterproductive reflex. It may make the moth look more like a hornet, or advertise its presence to predators who are not interestd in it. It may even, according to Aaron, help the moth to froth; Aaron notes that they may secrete white froth if really perturbed.
Who would want to perturb a moth? Possibly a scientist whose substitute-for-religious faith was perturbed by it. The taxonomy of Hemileucas is baffling. No matter how much faith people have in Creation and Intelligent Design, they can't deny that populations evolve in adaptation to environmental conditions. Students studying fruit flies can control the fruit flies' environment and cause their population to evolve within the limits of their species--from a group with mostly red eyes to a group with mostly orange eyes, and back again--over the course of a school term. Selective predation, dropping individuals with the trait the students want to breed out into the tadpole tank, will do it. But getting fruit flies to evolve into a different species, e.g. gnats, is not possible. Could one species of Hemileucas be nudged to evolve into a different species? For closely related species that can share the same habitat, that might be possible. The difference between H. maia and H. lucina is that maia caterpillars thrive if they eat oak leaves during the early stages of their lives, and about five percent of a group can survive if they eat other kinds of leaves. Over twenty or fifty years, could a group of maia be coaxed to develop a tendency to thrive on meadowsweet leaves, or a group of lucina be coaxed to develop a tendency to thrive on oak leaves? No one seems to have made the experiment, but it seems unlikely to work. H. artemis, also often considered a subspecies of nevadensis, will crossbreed with nevadensis but the resulting caterpillars don't show "hybrid vigor." Hybrid hemileucas can produce offspring but so far no hybrid family has kept going for even ten years.
John F. Cryan studied the Hemileucas extensively and wrote an extraordinary short book about what he called Hemileuca iroquois and believed to be a natural hybrid between maia and nevadensis. His ideas of how the species evolved were discarded as quickly as his name for menyanthevora but, in honor of his study of these moths, they are sometimes called Cryan's Buck Moths. His book is worth reading, especially his fantasy about how the young space explorer crries her pet stngngworms around in her pocket Now that's a "what not to do" and a half.
In fact there are a few aberrant people, like Alpheus Packard, who claim to have handled stingingworms without being stung. A careful researcher can, of course, handle insects without touching them; generally our touch does insects no more good than their touch does us. Any contact with Hemileucas stings, but the sensitive skin on our hands can grow callous very quickly. Packard's hands just might have been callous enough to have touched his stingingworms with only completely dead skin...but don't try that at home. In any case, caterpillars carried around in pockets tend to be crushed and make ugly green stains on clothing.
In Wisconsin, where their ranges overlap, even experts aren't always positive about whether a Hemileuca is maia or nevadensis or a hybrid between the two.
By the time the caterpillars start wandering about alone (see below) maia and nevadensis caterpillars normally look different. Nevadensis are more likely to have clearly marked stripes along the sides and rosette-shaped bristles on the back, but the main difference seems to be that maia caterpillars thrive on oak leaves and nevadensis do better on willow and cottonwood leaves. Even this is not a hard-and-fast rule. In the central States and provinces where maia and nevadensis have a chance to hybridize, they can. But it may be that the crossbreed caterpillars were the ones Henne and Diehl observed looking like nevadensis, eating oak leaves, and maturing more slowly than nevadensis found eating cottonwood leaves in the same general area. (They wrote from Manitoba.) The hybrids do not become menyanthevora.
Considering the theoretical question of how H. menyanthevora evolved, whether they evolved from maia or nevadensis or both, Rubinoff and Sperling seem to be suggesting that menyanthevora shouldn't be protected as an endangered species.since, if they went extinct, they might be re-created by reintroducing maia or nevadensis to the same environmental conditions that produced them in the first place. The position of this web site is that theoretical appeals to a theory of evolution won't answer this question, but a long-term experiment in selective breeding might. At least scientists who did a long-term experiment that would involve rearing stingingworms would have earned their fame. No scientists seem interested in trying the experiment.
Just to make things interesting, while adult nevadensis look so much like maia and the other mostly gray-winged species, the caterpillars look remarkably like burnsi, which grow up to have white wings with black markings. I imagine that the Hemileucas were Intelligently Designed by a Creator with a sense of humor: "One day these humans are going to evolve a civilization advanced enough that they can afford to sit around studying moths, and what a time they will have with THIS genus!" And, of course, the caterpillars' bristles were meant to be prickly but harmless like most caterpillars' hairs and bristles, and acquired venom as a consequence of sin. Nobody else has to believe that. It just seems the most logical explanation for the Hemileucas. Or, as Nature Serve puts it, "species concepts in this group are unstable." And Funet, usually a reliable source of history on how our knowledge of a species has developed, seems to throw up its collective hands; it currently offers no links for nevadensis or latifascia, though it is holding a data field for them.
The real "giant" silk moths often rest with their wings spread out, like butterflies. The Hemileucas don't they can fold their wings as the Noctuids and Tineids do, which seems appropriate. The Noctuid moth family includes most of the garden pests and the Tineids include the grain-eating and clothes-eating species that are pests indoors.
Photo from sandia.net, showing a Nevada Buck Moth in New Mexico with his wings folded. In this position the darker specimens look like giant Meal Moths.
Like most Hemileucas, nevadensis fly in the daytime, between September and December.
Photo by Finatic. Once her wings expand, and again if she lives long enough that additional eggs are ready to be laid, the female moth actively signals for males to help her do something about all those eggs. She does this by extruding the scent organ at her tail end, which releases a scent humans don't smell but have analyzed and synthesized. According to McElfresh and Millar:
"The major and possibly only component of the sex attractant pheromone of the moth Hemileuca nevadensis (Lepidoptera: Saturniidae) from southern California was determined to be (E10,Z12)-hexadecadienal (E10,Z12-16:Ald). Detectable quantities of the analogs (E10,Z12)-hexadecadien-1-yl acetate (E10,Z12-16:Ac) and (E10,Z12)-hexadecadien-1-ol (E10,Z12-16:OH).".
Paul Tuskes observed that a male nevadensis was induced to mate with a female H. lucina only when the moths had been both reared and caged together. He didn't experiment with H. maia, but they are believed to hybridize with maia, occasionally, where their ranges overlap.
Photo by Ispoon. The larger of two
Hemileuca moths is usually the female. Some pairs of
H.nevadensis have been photographed mating back to back, as most moths do, taking care not to touch wings, but some pairs positively embrace, the larger moth enfolding the smaller one between its wings. For about an hour they adore each other. After that they'll probably never see each other again and, if they do, will show no sign of recognizing each other.
Photo from sandia.net. Mama Moth lays her eggs in a tidy cluster on a food plant. The eggs expand and harden a bit after being laid but you can see why the female looks fat and feels eager to unload these things. All the eggs a moth will ever lay are in her body from the beginning; as some eggs are laid, more have room to develop. A Hemileuca may live long enough to lay three clusters of eggs. The biggest brood, with the most viable eggs, is always the first,
Most moths mate back to back, quickly before anything can see them, and, obviously, try to avoid making contact with their wings. Silk moths, whose wings don't have to last as long as most, are more likely to make time to cuddle. The Hemileucas are far from holding the title for prolonged cuddling; some of the bigger silk moths spend the whole day, if they do find mates, smelling and touching. Some photos of nevadensis show them mating back to back, but some couples mate face to face around a twig. Either way, before and after the act of egg fertilization they typically spend up to an hour snogging. Then they separate and show no further interest in each other.
Since the male, likewise, produces the most viable offspring in the first mating, Hemileucas are most attracted to young moths who have not mated before. Males have been known to ignore older females, who were real, nearby, and exercising their scent organs to let the males know they had fresh eggs to fertilize, while the males were busy searching for a younger female whose scent had been applied to some inanimate object. Female moths have not been shown to be quite that stupid but they, too, lose all interest in their first mates if they get a chance to mate a second time with a younger male who has not mated before. "The selfish gene" overrides whatever affection the moths felt during their hour or so of passionate romance.
Photo by Davidemartin. The first caterpillar skins are black. Later skins show different amounts and arrangements of yellow. Generally yellow seems to increase, in proportion to black, as caterpillars mature, but actual patterns vary. At this age they are quite active but seem to know that they're safest from predators when predators see them as one great big bundle of bristles.
Photo by Mathewlbrust. Young
Hemileucas like to stay in a cluster after hatching. Each one's bristles protect it from its siblings' bristles, and anyway they don't pack much venom at this age. If they have to move to a different host plant they may move in a procession. As they grow bigger, they avoid constant relocation by separating..
Photo by Hasfitz5. I thought this was a photo of one caterpillar molting but, on closer examination, it's a bigger sibling following right behind a smaller one. Here is a video, with the time-lapse photography considerably speeded up, making the caterpillars look spastic.
Photo by Cheiris. Shorter rosettes of bristles, as found on older caterpillars, allow more bristle tips to touch skin and are likely to cause more painful sting wounds than longer branching bristles (like those still found at the back of this specimen's head).
Photo by Cchapin. The first rule of not being stung by stingingworms is not to do this. Avoid contact. The bristles are pre-loaded with venom; the caterpillar does not have to make an effort to sting, its cast-off dead skin will remain irritating. A friendly relationship with a young
Hemileuca is a distant one. The way I recommend approaching these caterpillars is with a stick. If for some reason you want to keep the animal alive, put the stick down in front of it. Curiosity about a stick that suddenly pops up in their path usually motivates caterpillars to climb onto it, at which time humans can move a caterpillar who is still peering nearsightedly down at the stick, no doubt thinking "
I don't see anything about this stick that makes it different from other sticks"
It is not perfectly clear whether Hemileucas know they are venomous. They are social creatures and seem to like one another. Even when caterpillars seem to quarrel and try to prod each other with their bristles, they don't actually sting each other, so they have no way of knowing how nasty they are to everyone else. They are probably not "hateful" and "evil," the words that usually occur to people who meet them in real life, so much as they are numb, dumb, crawling digestive tracts just like the harmless caterpillars. But they are under-predated. What natural instincts usually tell humans to do when we encounter a stingingworm is healthy and appropriate. Instincts say to get them between a firm, solid substance and a solid, heavy stick, and apply enough pressure to flatten the skin among the bristles. Bristle tips break off easily and continue to leak venom for days, so it's good to use caution in disposing of the stick.
Understanding how the bristle tips work is the basis for what is known about first aid for accidental contact with a stingingworm. They all cause pain. How many bristle tips touch your skin, and how many may have stuck in the skin, seems to make the difference between a brief "sting" like touching nettles, or nauseating pain radiating from the site of tiny wounds that continue to seep blood for weeks. Stingingworms' bristles work like bees' stingers. The wound starts to heal, and the pain to clear up, after the tips are out of the skin. Most sources recommend touching duct tape or something similar to the skin, because that usually lifts out any bristle tips that are sticking in, and washing the skin with cold water. Applying an ice pack and whatever else the person uses to distract perself from pain may also help. In theory a person who was violently allergic to insect venom could go into anaphylactic shock from making contact with a stingingworm, but in practice it almost never happens. Anyway those people have usually been advised by doctors to carry Epi Pens.
Photo by Hanslaske. Yellow and white bristles above are good camouflage for a large caterpillar crawling through dry grass. A cow, sheep, or horse might inadvertently ingest this caterpillar and be sick. Fear of this danger ran high, about a hundred years ago. In practice the caterpillars usually seem to coexist with nicer animals.
Photo by Eknuth, who offered this brown-topped individual a stick to crawl onto after confirming that it was following him. Stingingworms aren't known for following people in a deliberate attempt to crawl up anyone's leg, but if the ground is hot enough to be uncomfortable most caterpillars will crawl up whatever is available. Most of the caterpillars we find crawling on the ground are looking for a place to pupate, deliberately seeking something that's
not their food plant and not where predators will look for them--but stingingworms pupate in the ground, so thermoregulation is their most likely motive for crawling up things other than food plants. Anyway they fit into Edward Lear's pseudo-scientific species name, the Nasticreechia Krorluppia. Few of the creechia that want to krorluppia are nastier.
Photo from BioRxiv. Latifascia is Latin for "side bands" but not all caterpillars with side bands are necessarily latifascia.
In the final instar some can be described as yellow-green or yellow-orange. They may make some gesture in the way of a cocoon, or just try to hide in leaf litter, in order to pupate through the summer, typically June to September or October. Cage-reared specimens don't even seem to require leaf litter, although people trying to rear Hemileucas in the Eastern States, where the air is damp enough to aggravate their susceptibility to fungal infections, have reported success from encouraging them to pupate in a layer of finely shredded toilet tissue above a layer of kitty litter. Apparently the absorbent soil, like the hot sand and dry air in their native habitat, help keep them dry enough to resist attacking fungi. The absence of leaves to hide in does not seem to bother cage-reared individuals, who just pupate where they are, bare, trusting the mysterious beings who have supplied them with food to protect them while they are morphing. Since there's not much of a cover over the pupa, if there's any, their eclosion is easy to watch and has been documented in videos.
Photo by Omarfpena. Newly eclosed (hatched from her pupa), the young moth climbs to the top of a plant stalk to stretch out her wings. It takes over an hour for these moths to "get pumped" up to their full size, at which time, or sometimes before, the female starts pumping her scent gland to summon males, and the cycle starts again.
