Hemileuca Lares (Post for 7.11.24)

Hemileuca lares is still poorly documented online.

When the second page of a web search for this species turns up a post I wrote, many years ago, that said  that web pages have been set up for the species but not filled in with information, you know the species is still very poorly documented.

A few new web sites for moths have been set up in the last few years, such as the various INaturalist pages, some of which include Florjaramillo95's three-photo study of Hemileuca lares from 2022.

As shown it's a small silk moth of a rather pretty light brown color. Like other Hemileucas it doesn't eat, but lives entirely off the fat its body was able to store as a caterpillar. The thorax is fat and furry; the abdominal section, which in a silkmoth is used entirely for the reproductive parts and eggs, can look fat on an egg-loaded female, thin in males and older females.

It's found on the Mexican side of the desert, in places like Sonora and Durango. What it eats is unknown; it doesn't seem to be common or economically important enough for anyone to have tried to find out. People don't even complain about the caterpillars, probably because, when they're in this moth's habitat during its active season, their main concern is getting to somewhere else more supportve of human life.

Is it a true species? Who knows? Who cares? The Hemileucas are moths that defy our preconceived notions of what defines a species. They can look and behave like different species when they are in fact litter mates that grew up in different environments. Nobody seems to have researched whether lares is capable of crossbreeding with any other species or type of Hemileuca.

Lares was named, not after a goddess as such, but after the collective of household ghosts most Roman families offered food and wine. It was one of the last species named according to the traditional rule of naming the Hemileucas after spirits some ancient people actually worshipped. It was named and described by a naturalist called Druce in 1897. Funet.fi, which is usually good for storing digital images of the first description of a species, lacks copies of Druce's monograph or of the naturalists' annual report that cited it. 

Did Druce draw this picture, still the only picture of H. lares most web sites have if they have one at all? It's a drawing, not a photo, with the emphasis on showig the subtle shadings of color and wing structure that show it's a Hemileuca. This image appears on several web pages now. I ganked it from an INaturalist page but it's also in use at Wikipedia and other science sites. The Entomological Society admitted that all they knew about this species was what they could see by looking at this one specimen, a male, collected near Durango. They thought it "should be between mania and hualapai," but admitted they didn't know enough about those species, either, to say whether that evolutionary theory about lares had any base in fact.

There are specimens of H. lares in IBUNAM, the Mexican natural history museum, but not in many other museum collections.

People who are seriously interested in the ecological and economic concerns of northern Mexico might want to read this digital book, which Google says mentions Hemileuca lares somewhere, probably on a list.

https://atizapan.gob.mx/wp-content/uploads/2022/12/Gaceta-79-POEL-ATIZAPAN_compressed.pdf

I'll admit I didn't want to put enough time into this article to find out what the author says about lares, which is clearly not the primary topic of the book. The main fact I take away from a search of what's known to cyberspace about this moth is that this is a species, or type, it would be really easy for someone to study in a serious scientific way and become famous.