About That Psychedelic Sunset-Colored Moth...

Last week, by a real accident not a contrived one, an article about a fantastic, psychedelic, sunset-colored moth appeared at this web site.

The moth, Hemileuca eglanterina, is real. It's one of the things stingingworms can grow up to be. The moth genus Hemileuca is interesting to scientists, and information about these moths is exploding, because these animals are forcing scientists to reconsider what we mean by "species."

Looking up a moth online is still a chore. There are a lot more moths in this world than there are butterflies, and although the butterfly posts here have mentioned great glaring gaps in our knowledge about butterflies, the gaps in what's known about moths are much bigger. 

On Saturday night, on the way to the screen porch where I go online, I noticed something stuck to my skirt. Hmm. It was late in the summer for a stingingworm, and small for one. It was early for a "Bear" caterpillar, and small for one of those, too. I picked up a stick (thank goodness nobody has a mown lawn around here!) and scraped it off my skirt, first of all. It dropped to the ground, curling up with its prickles outward, as both stingingworms and "Bears" will do. I inspected it with a flashlight. I'd seen things like it before. It looked like a baby Bear. 

I thought I might write a post about it. How many insects can you readers stand to study in a week? I sat down to Google it. It ought to be a piece of cake. Only one common caterpillar in Virginia has white skin and stiff black hair.

So Google, in its annoying way, assumed that I really wanted to know about caterpillars that have black skin and white hair. There are more of them. Turns out there's not one that is normally considered to have white skin and black hair, although I see that combination almost every July. But Google kept showing me page after page of information about irrelevant caterpillars with black skin and white hair. Drat and blast, Google, I thought, I know what a walnut caterpillar looks like. That ain't it.

Long story short: it's an immature form of the Giant Leopard Moth caterpillar, which is even more common hereabouts early in the school time, sometimes seen during thaws in winter, and much nicer than it looks.

The Giant Leopard Moth is gigantic only in its family; it's not as big as a silk moth. The moth has white wings with black speckles, some of which, in the right light, iridesce bright deep blue.

Photo donated to Wikipedia By Jeremy Johnson - http://www.meddlingwithnature.com, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=41471642 .

It's about an inch long, maybe a little more, in that resting position with a wingspan of two inches or a little more. Males are bigger than females, and can carry them about if a couple are disturbed while canoodling. There can be more than one generation in a year; the moths may be found flying at any time, all summer long. 

Caterpillars of almost all moths are most often observed in their final instar, when they stop eating and start prowling about, looking for a place to pupate. In Virginia this most often occurs in late summer to autumn and, since the creatures hibernate, in winter as well. They are the biggest caterpillars we usually see, though a few of the big silk moth caterpillars are even bigger; they typically grow up to three inches long. The actual caterpillar is thin, surrounded by stiff hairs that are about as long as the body is thick. It would be only a slight stretch to call the caterpillar accordion-pleated; it can stand in such a way that the bands of hair look continuous, or in such a way that the bands of bare skin show. 

What was confusing Google is that, although the skin can look blackish or whitish, it is usually described as red. Well, when it's black or white there is a reddish undertone. But apparently this is considered the most typical color--note that most of the actual skin is black, but the red shows up bright!

Photo By Asturnut at English Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=6549143 .

That's the way the full-grown caterpillars look here, too. But the point of confusion was that hereabouts the younger caterpillars, about one inch long, nearly always have white skin in between the patches of melanin below the hair. Call it pale or pinkish red if you like. It's closer to a true white than the skin on a typical White human. 

Photo displayed at WhatsThatBug, a pest control site. The site deserves a scolding for not mentioning that these caterpillars are not a serious pest, nor do they need controlling. Like most of the oversized moths, their populations are pretty well controlled by nature. 

The WhatsThatBug article mentioned that these caterpillars can move much faster than most caterpillars move--at least the little ones can, and do. They get slower as they grow larger and the weather grows colder. All winter, whenever the temperature goes much above freezing, they crawl out of their little burrows and try to find something to eat to keep their strength up. (They like plantain.) But, being cold-blooded, they don't move very fast in winter, and they risk being caught out and chilled into hibernation as the thin winter sun sets. They can survive freezing; the danger is that mice will find them and eat them while they're completely unable to move.

As a kid I never found any information about these animals at all. I was only guessing that they were some sort of caterpillar. I used to call them Wire Brushes, because of the way they look. 

Probably the most important thing you need to know about the caterpillar of Hypercompe (or Ecpantheria) scribonia is that, although it's not altogether harmless to the garden, it's not much of a nuisance even there, and it is pretty harmless to humans. (At least, nobody seems to have tried eating it--we don't know how toxic it would be if swallowed.) The hairs are stiff and bristly but not venomous. 

Any kind of hair that gets down your neck on a hot day, including the cut ends of your own, is likely to cause a rash that lasts until you can shower it all away. This should not be counted against caterpillars. 

In the garden, their deal is that they nibble on everything, but don't eat very much of any particular thing and don't spoil your plants. Some plants they are known to like nibbling on, according to Wikipedia, are plantain, dandelion, violets, maples, bougainvillea, cabbage, marijuana, citrus trees, bindweed, Euphorbias, sunflowers, myrtle, lettuce, honeysuckle, magnolia, mulberries, bananas, basil, paulownias, pokeberries, fruit trees, locust trees, willows, and lilacs. They nibble on some of the most toxic plants in the garden, including Brugmannsia, with no noticeable ill effects. 

Thanks to their varied diet, they can survive almost anywhere; they are found from Canada to Colombia.

The search became easy after I found a site that asserted that there are exactly 138 kinds of caterpillars that are common in Virginia, and showed all 138 on one page. The only one that looked like my small bristly caterpillar was the big bristly caterpillar of H. scribonia. When I searched for that name, Google pulled up lots of information confirming that little Wire Brushes, at least some of which have white skin, grow into big Wire Brushes. But without that list of the full 138, I would never have found my caterpillar.

It would not have been the first time that, out on the westernmost Point of Virginia, we'd been visited by a species not normally found in Virginia, either. The site that listed the 138 species did mention our occasional visits by Datana integerrima, the Walnut Caterpillar Moth, but in the 1980s when I first found a Datana irruption the species wasn't in Peterson. 

So you can understand why inquiring minds still want to know more about all the kinds of moth, or butterfly or flower or snail or anything else in nature, when they're trying to find information about the one in front of them...and why existing literature still has great glaring gaps in it.

Ten years ago I did a very cursory and rather hostile post about the twenty-some kinds of Hemileucas Google listed back then. (Google lists fifty species names now, although the relevance of some of them is to illustrate how confusing this genus has been to entomologists.) Photos were not available for most of them. Even descriptions of their typical colors weren't available for some of the Mexican species; Google was not yet proud enough of Google Translate to show people Googling in English links to documents in Spanish. It was a very consciously amateurish post ten years ago; it's out of date now. Yet people keep visiting it, because it's still the most thorough free source of information about all the Hemileucas that's available. 

Gentle Readers, we're finding books about moths and butterflies that people have created just by ganking material from Wikipedia. Some of these books have been published on Amazon and then pulled down because they were pure plagiarism--not comparative reading with new material that's not on Wikipedia, just copy and paste. And the Wikipedia articles for some of these animals are pretty thin, I might add. But these travesties of books are selling because they at least claim to fill a need.

Someone I knew in real life paid me $50 plus meals and transportation to spend a day writing that 2013 post about "Buck Moths in Detail with Pictures." That person died, a few years ago, at the age of 89.

It now remains to be seen who wants credit for funding the updated series of posts on the Hemileucas that inquiring minds need and deserve. Most people are not going to pay $400 for Tuttle's, Collins', and Tuskes' book; many people would feel daunted by its university-level writing if they found it in a library. (Though I will say that Tuskes posted much of his research about the silk moths as PDF monographs, and they're better written than many scientific papers. If you are a university-level reader who enjoys reading biology books, you will probably like The Wild Silk Moths of North America.)

I have written some of them. They will go live here upon receipt of $5 per species. Again, not all of the 50 species in this genus that have been named have been counted as distinctive species long enough that much has ever been written about them. The species about which I've found enough to make full-length posts, so far--working in alphabetical order--are annulata, artemis, burnsi, californica, chinatiensis, diana, dyari, and eglanterina. (Not, e.g., denudata, which was listed as a distinct species because it looks like one at first glance, but which turns out to be just a mutant variety of eglanterina.) Drafts of those posts exist. The posts discuss what's known about these species' complex relationships and the arguments for and against continuing to classify them as separate species. 

Those who saw a post with the picture of a splendid California sunset and a moth that looked as if it had been painted to match the sky were not hallucinating from last week's heat. That post exists. It wasn't meant to have gone live until it was funded. It will reappear when it is paid for.

It won't be a great contribution to the advancement of Science, since I'm not doing new research on these moths, but it will be a useful resource to people who want to know what they've found. 

This is your opportunity to fund a real advance in the usefulness of recent science, Gentle Readers All I'm really doing here is aggregating data that may be useful toward our goal of Saving The Butterflies--cataloguing, compiling, writing up, anthologizing--but hey, I'm a writer, that happens to be my talent. I am putting this information into a form people who are not in residence at a university can use.

Since it's appearing online with liberal fair use of other people's photos, it won't be published as a book (unless people want to hold a contest for new photos, or do research-quality original drawings), but people will be able to print and bind it in a notebook if they want to. 

Send $5 for each post you want to fund to Boxholder, P.O. Box 322, Gate City, Virginia 24251-0322, by US postal order (payable to the Boxholder) or Amazon giftcard (payable to Priscilla King). 

If the funds received exceed the number of Hemileuca species, we can always branch out into other moths. There are hundreds to choose from. If that happens, funders will get to decide whether we discuss the genus Automeris, which can also fairly be called stingingworms, or one that's more often found in Virginia, like the wacky, colorful Datanas.