(Updated because it went live containing some errors.)
Of all the Hemileucas, menyanthevora may be the most surprising. It looks like a subspecies of H. maia, whose range it shares. H. maia resembles, but consistently differs from, H. nevadensis, whose range adjoins its range. H. latifascia has generally been seen as a subspecies of nevadensis, whose range it shares. Yet hybridization studies show that menyanthevora and latifascia, which don't look alike or live in the same places, are more closely related to each other than either is to maia or nevadensis. It's as if these Hemileucas had been created by an Intelligent Designer with a sense of humor who was thinking, "And when these humans start to work out taxonomic studies of other animals, these little silk moths will give them a big laugh!" Menyanthevora look pretty much exactly like maia, and their genetic difference from maia seems to be a matter of individual difference, but they can't eat the same food and don't mate with maia. Those individual differences are consistent. Legge et al. suggested that the differences might be produced by something other than genes.
Photo by Larose Forest, who notes that, in their few habitats (mostly in Ontario), "there are always a few" of these moths flying about in the daytime during their short season. Each individual moth lives only a few days, but over the course of about a month, hundreds of moths live and die.
There are not a lot of photos of menyanthevora on the Internet. That's not because people don't photograph it, but because it's hard for nature sites to verify its species identity from photos. Most images of this species are of dead specimens in museums.
It is not really possible to tell H. menyanthevora from H. maia by looking. Medium-sized, usually gray moths, whose wings are shaped like the big silk moths' wings but who fold their wings in around them like the little Noctuids, they have some typical visible differences but the range of ways they look overlaps. Menyanthevora are often pale-colored or translucent with a pale enough gray base color that the white band across the center is not clearly marked, but blurs into the gray on either side. The one solid, consistence difference between maia and menyanthevora is that maia caterpillars eat oak leaves and menyanthevora caterpillars eat the leaves of a wetlands plant called the bogbean (Latin menyanthes). A female moth who is laying eggs will identify her species by laying eggs on the kind of plant her caterpillars are going to eat.
Male Hemileucas, whose heads are so small relative to their big upper bodies that people can think they've lost their heads, don't have a lot of brain but male menyanthevora can be recognized, if you happen to be able to test their reactions to female maia, by their indifference to maia's sex appeal. H. menyanthevora will sometimes accept H. latifascia as mates, and some such couples produce viable offspring. H. menyanthevora are not attracted to H. maia, H. lucina, H. peigleri, H. slosseri, or any other variety of Hemileucas. Whatever consciousness they have includes consciousness of kind.
H. maia is unfortunately abundant throughout eastern North America. H. menyanthevora is, like its food plant, limited to a small amount of territory along the US-Canada border. For many years scientists felt confident in calling menyanthevora a subspecies of maia, and several science sites still list it that way today.
Nevertheless, it seems that menyanthevora is more different from maia than several Hemileucas that are generally accepted as different species. According to DNA studies, the twenty, or fifty, or seventy named species of Hemileuca can fairly be described as variant forms of just a half-dozen separate species. Some want to add menyanthevora to the list.
Why is maia so much more abundant than other Hemileuca species, and does maia DNA suggest that this species might be divided into subspecies? It does not. Maia DNA was found to show geographic variations whose territories' borders run from east to west and aren't broken by the Great Lakes. This may explain how it's possible for menyanthevora and latifascia to crossbreed. They share the same geographic range with the northern group of maia and nevadensis.
Christian Schmidt discusses how the possible evolution of these species and varieties of moths might tie into a theoretical story of how North America emerged from the Ice Age.
Considered as a species, it is rare. Probably it always has been rare; some speculate that, as a species, it evolved out of maia recently. Hemileuca menyanthevora has ten known habitats, all near Lake Ontario. With interest in conserving natural wetlands has come some interest in conserving their natural inhabitants, even stingingworms. H. menyanthevora is an endangered species. In 2022 it was listed as a species of Very High Concern, with some people complaining bitterly, even filing lawsuits, because federal protection of this and other species newly recognized as endangered was not being enforced more vigorously and sooner.
This means that an animal detested by all who know it, an animal that people wish were extinct, currently enjoys more protection than human beings do. Sorry-not-sorry, I feel a rant coming on.
In New York, farmers specializing in boxwood, who cherish a fantasy of being able to "control" bostree moths with poison spray, had to prove that the sprays that will probably make the boxtree moth a major pest nationwide wouldn't affect Hemileuca menyanthevora. Nobody has been required to prove that spraying poisons will not affect human beings who are sensitive to, e.g., glyphosate, which chemical companies are still trying to deny is the primary cause of the epidemic of gastrointestinal disease that was noted in the 1990s and really exploded after 2009. Anyone who lives in a clean enough environment to be able to tell when person has been exposed to glyphosate can easily see that this popular, odorless, tasteless "herbicide" causes flares of all kinds of chronic diseases, not only gastrointestinal diseases though primarily those, and also reduces immunity and has an eerie association with the progress of cancer.
(My husband sprayed Roundup on the lawn borders, once, and while I thought I must have eaten something accidentally contaminated with wheat flour, he immediately began to notice symptoms of something badly wrong. Six months later, his usual 48 hours of mild flu symptoms after his annual flu shot turned into pneumonia and kidney failure. Exactly six months after the first day he admitted being too ill to work, about a year after that one use of poison spray, he died of multiple myeloma. He had tested positive for cancer ten years before; after a minor operation his blood tests for cancer stayed negative for about a decade. Obviously his one use of Roundup didn't cause the multiple myeloma, but it's the only known risk factor that could have brought the disease out of remission.)
For years everyone agreed that nobody ever dies of celiac disease, a rare hereditary disease caused by inability to digest wheat and exacerbated by an autoimmune reaction to the presence of wheat inside the body. The AMA Home Medical Guide declared: "The only treatment necessary is a diet completely free from wheat gluten for as long as the patient lives." How long was that likely to be? Celiac disease runs in a few Irish families; different gene mixes give different prognoses, but for many celiacs, if the gluten-free diet is adopted early enough, the celiac trait actually flips into a super-power of muscle strength and resistance to infections. Even with untreated celiac disease my great-grandmother stayed active and died alone at home at the age of 103. \She was dyspeptic and grumpy, but strong as a little horse. That's typical.
In the 1990s, Roundup (the trademark for glyphosate spray in the US) became hugely popular, and the US saw an "epidemic" of gastrointestinal disease. Suddenly celiac disease became a mysterious crippling disorder from which "some people find some relief" in a gluten-free diet, the progress of the disease accelerated (at age thirty I developed celiac sprue, which historically used to appear after age sixty), and people who didn't even have the celiac gene started having dramatic celiac-like reactions that were diagnosed as everything from attention-seeking to galloping fatal cancers. (A neighbor was told in 1995 that he had six months to live. He was pushed out of business by the COVID panic in 2020.) In 2009, glyphosate went generic, companies competed to market it to farmers, farmers started spraying it directly on food, a few people died right away from a sudden inability to digest apparently anything, and that epidemic of gastrointestinal disease reached pandemic proportions. Some celiac support groups deny--are they being paid to deny?--that glyphosate has anything to do with celiac disease; at least two popular books have made the case that glyphosate is the sole and whole cause of pseudo-celiac symptoms.
If you live in a place that is clean enough that you can tell when you've been exposed to glyphosate, it's easy to tell whether glyphosate aggravates your symptoms of gastrointestnal diseases or anything else (and yes, it does aggravate just about all chronic conditions). People who are able to make such tests tend, as I did in 2016, to become believers. I am a Highly Sensory-Perceptive person, another hereditary trait that was first described as simply being a Highly Sensitive Person. It's a paradoxical trait; our ability to notice physical reactions gives us considerable control of them. When I had COVID I didn't ask for a pill to lower my blood pressure; I lowered it by meditation. When I sprained my ankle I didn't use a circulation-killing brace or expensive pain pills with side effects; I used rest, stretching, and trigger-point massage, plus emotional support from The Nephews and the kitten Mogwai whose story is now in a printed book you should demand from your local bookstore. When I've been exposed to glyphosate, there are things I can do to relieve symptoms more effectively than popping Rinvoq, but there are still unpleasant physical symptoms that can be dangerous. My blog buddy and fellow celiactivist, Grandma Bonnie Peters, deliberately sought out a stroke (after failing to go down with flu) because she developed liver cancer from persistently eating glyphosate-poisoned vegetables and honey.
"Deaths from celiac disease" has become a thing. For confirmed celiacs the mortality rate has doubled in the present century. For pseudo-celiacs, all anyone really seems to know is that pseudo-celiac reactions (to glyphosate) are often more severe that true celiac reactions to wheat. Too many of those people, many of whom weren't even Irish and never had the benefit of celiac super-powers, have died. To put things in perspective: about a million Americans have died from COVID; 60 to 70 million Americans are dying by inches while trying to manage the symptoms of chronic gastrointestinal diseases. Disabling or fatal reactions to COVID-19 vaccines may or may not even come anywhere close to costing the United States as much as the gastrointestinal disease epidemic, but I don't think they ever will. We as a nation are dying of diseases whose symptoms polite people don't talk about. And there may be gastrointestinal diseases that have other causes and are not aggravated by glyphosate, but I do not personally know of any. I will cautiously accept the claim that, e.g., sickle cell disease may be completely independent of any glyphosate reaction patients have, but I've heard no such claim for any gastrointestinal disease.
The corporations nicknamed "Big Pharma" want so desperately to sell everybody on the idea of "needing" daily pills, and those nicknamed "Big Food" and "Big Ag" are so badly addicted to the vicious poison spray cycle in farming, that the insurance industry discourages doctors from measuring and documenting the role of glyphosate in gastrointestinal diseases. And it's not exactly news that successful celiactivists are people who rely on our own personal health care plan, not on doctors' medical treatment plans, to manage celiac disease. We don't need doctors to keep the trait flipped onto its superpower side. But we do need a glyphosate ban.
And are we getting one? We are not. It's legal to spray glyphosate where it may push someone's cancer into Stage IV. It's legal to spray glyphosate for the purpose of making known celiacs miserable. But at least our government has taken action to discourage people spraying insecticides where they might kill a few mutant, damp-tolerant stingingworms.
The US government cares more about stingingworms than it does about me. It cares more about stingingworms than it does about my beautiful twenty-something Nephews with all their roads before them.
Stingingworms.
Not that I am bitter, but let's just say that the only candidates I am at all likely to support in any foreseeable elections are people of Irish descent, who know what we are up against, and who have demonstrated at least as much concern about the lives of Irish-American people as they have about stingingworms.
Well, at least menyanthevora's food preference gives it an instinct to stay in the fens near Lake Ontario and avoid places where most humans want to live or work. For a Hemileuca that's good.
It doesn't even crossbreed with H. maia or H. lucina, which appear to be its closest relatives. It does crossbreed with H. nevadensis latifascia, but not with other subspecies of H. nevadensis, which some think is enough to qualify latifascia for consideration as a species rather than a subspecies.
Hemileuca (maia) menyanthevora has been given yet another name. In honor of other inhabitants of its territory, it was first called H. iroquois. Whether Iroquois people complained about this is not recorded. Anyway, that name was dropped; an English name, "Cryan's buck moth," was also discarded; the moth was classified as a subspecies of maia and renamed in honor of its eating habits.
The bogbean is not really a bean, but a member of the aster family. H. nevadensis can eat the leaves of plants in the willow family. In Wisconsin a small population of stingingworms were found eating bogbean leaves. They were identified as H. nevadensis, not even as latifascia. However, Wisconsin is believed to be a place where menyanthevora could some day become established.
Menyanthes trilobata, with fork-shaped leaves and white blossoms. Photo from Wild Your Garden. According to Wikipedia, the roots are edible, though they taste bitter; they are sometimes ground and usd like flour, and sometmes used to add a bitter taste to beer.
Fortunately the stingingworms leave plenty of these plants for any humans who want them. The range for menyanthevora consists of lake-shore areas in New York, Ontario, and Wisconsin. The range for Menyanthes includes most of eastern Canada, most of the eastern States (as far south as Virginia), and some places in Europe and Asia.
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