bugs – Page 28

X-rated dobsonflies

About a month ago, I got some really strange insects to my blacklighted sheet while out doing moths one night. Long, gray bugs with giant wings and feathery antennae, I wrote about them in this post. They turned out to be fishflies, a group of insects I’d previously never heard of.

This weekend I found their cousins, the dobsonflies. I had actually heard of dobsonflies before, because one of the reviews I’d read for my new macro lens, prior to buying it, had had a close-up photo of a dobsonfly head. Still, I’d never actually seen one myself. There were four of them, three females and a male, attracted to bright white security lights on the side of a large building out near where Blackburnian’s mom lives. These happen to be Eastern Dobsonflies, Corydalus cornutus, the only species to occur in eastern North America. The other three North American species are found primarily in the southwest.

In the photo above there’s a male and a female. The male is the guy with the giant mandibles. The females were all mostly quite low to the ground and easy to reach. The male was another story, he was up near the top of the wall and I had to stand on a box and reach up with Blackburnian’s shoe to gently knock it down to a level where I could reach it. He was the one I really wanted, though, because he’s so impressive. Males reach about 4 inches (10 cm) long, nearly a quarter of which is the mandibles. Females are only slightly smaller at just over 3 inches (7.5 cm).

I plucked one of each of them up, pinching their wings together over their back. When I snagged their wings they both reared their heads back, trying to grab me with their mandibles, or at the very least startle me. I knew that their wings were long enough that I was out of reach, so I didn’t buy into it, despite the ferocious appearance. While the female might be able to give you a pinch, the mandibles of the male aren’t really built for biting and can’t really do much for you. Most sources I read say that the adults don’t eat; however, one said that an older research paper indicated they would feed from honey water solutions or have been found at fermented baits (like what I’d put out for moths in cold weather). Either way, they’re not hunting their food.

The male’s mandibles are, if anything, even more ferocious-looking than those of the female. As Blackburnian described them, the creatures look prehistoric. Given that they’re not used in eating, what are those huge mandibles actually used for? A commenter to my fishflies post suggested that they have a role in mating. Searching the net turns up little additional information. Many sites simply say the long pincers are used to grasp females during mating. One suggests their impressive length has developed through sexual selection, used to impress the ladies. Another indicates the mandibles are used in male-male confrontations, such as in competing for females (whether they actually fence with them or simply show them off depends on the species).

This site mentions a 1952 paper that describes the mating process: “As part of the premating ritual, males place their elongated jaws on the wings of the females perpendicular to the axis of the female’s wings. The male’s jaws also function in jousting with rival males. However, males were not observed to grasp the females as reported in older literature.” This second site has a slightly different description: “The male uses the mandibles during the mating process when capturing, prodding, and caressing the female, and they are also used when males fight one another. Prior to mating the male will flutter his wings, and both males and females will touch antennae.”

I had the opportunity to find out first-hand.

I actually missed capturing the first stage on camera. When I’d finished taking photos of the two of them I plucked them up, one in each hand, and carried them off to the garden where I placed them on a low brick wall. Not even giving it much thought, I’d placed them down nearly side by side. They didn’t take off upon release (they never do), but instead the male turned his head and I could almost hear the thought run through his mind: “Oho! A female! What luck!”

He dispensed with the foreplay, there was no touching of antennae as described on the pages I read. There was no showing off of mandibles to the female. In fact, the female seemed completely disinterested through the entire session. She just sat there, not moving, her antennae folded over her back, reminding me of how a mammal who is feeling unamused will lay its ears flat. I bet if I looked closely I could’ve seen her rolling her eyes.

The first thing the male did upon making his discovery was (as the first linked site said) turn perpendicular to the female and lay his long mandibles across her back. But he didn’t just rest them there, he appeared to actually put pressure on the lower half of her abdomen and then slid them backwards along her wings to the wingtips. He did this several times, and I presume the purpose was to squeeze out the spermatophores of any competing males. Dobsonflies transfer sperm in the form of gelatinous balls, so it would be fairly easy for a male to remove any left by a previous male, in order to ensure that his own sperm are the ones to fertilize her eggs. A lot of species, both invertebrates and vertebrates, will employ a similar strategy.

I finally decided it might be worth getting my camera to record. When I returned, he was reaching under the female’s “skirt” with his mandibles. I couldn’t tell exactly what he was doing – perhaps checking for the presence of a pre-existing spermatophore? Removing it, if there was one?

Once he felt satisfied with whatever he was checking for, he started fluttering his wings and curling his abdomen around toward the female. He tried to tuck it under her wings to make contact, but seemed to be having trouble for some reason. Actually, it looked to me that his abdomen just wasn’t long enough to do what he wanted it to do (isn’t this a common feeling with males?). He seemed reluctant to remove his mandibles from under her wings, which appeared to be the main problem, to me.

After making a few attempts from the left, he decided to try from the other side. He shuffled over and swung around to face the other way. Again he checked under her wings first.

Then tried from the other side.

This time he removed his mandibles from under her wings so he could straighten out and reach better. Success! During all this he was fluttering his wings like crazy and generally obscuring the female from view. From what I could see, she continued to simply sit there. It seemed funny that the mating of something with such a long, flexible abdomen would be of the facing-opposite-directions sort, rather than the male above (or below), facing the same direction, and simply curving his abdomen down to meet the female’s.

It didn’t take long, perhaps ten or fifteen seconds, and then he turned himself around again to face the female.

Finally, he rested his mandibles across her abdomen and they both sat there, still. I checked on them a few times as I went about photographing the rest of the moths I’d caught, and they stayed like that for at least ten minutes. Eventually when I went back the female had crawled off the top of the brick into the shade of the side, but the male remained where he’d been. I assume that this was the male mate-guarding the female until the spermatophore “took”, to prevent other males from removing his sperm before they had a chance to fertilize the eggs, despite what I’d read on one site suggesting it hadn’t been observed in the species.

I thought this whole thing was so neat. You know, it’s one thing to just simply see a species (cool as this species happened to be), but it’s quite another to observe a behaviour. Something I’m often guilty of, I find I tend to breeze by, looking at but not really watching what I’m seeing. I’ll identify the birds, for instance, often simply by ear, but I won’t really pay attention to what they’re up to unless there’s some commotion or something to draw my attention. It really is something I should do more – stop and smell the roses, as they say.

Life on a maple branch

One of the necessary chores that comes with keeping horses, of course, is having to muck out the stalls. It’s a pleasant sort of physical labour, where you feel you’ve had a good workout and been productive at the same time. If kept on top of every day it’s neither a lot of work nor very time consuming, but can add up quickly if neglected.

It was while I was busy doing this that I noticed today’s subject. I was returning from dumping a wheelbarrow load, my mind on other things (such as wondering how Mom still does this every day, at her age), and so wasn’t paying a lot of attention to bugs or other critters. If this bug had been anywhere else on the maple tree I probably wouldn’t have noticed, but it was at the tip of the very lowest leaf of the branch that hangs over the driveway, pretty much at eye level. And the bug was red and black. Hard to miss.

It was busy laying eggs. Naturally, I didn’t have my camera since I was working in a spot I wasn’t keen on the camera being, so I dashed indoors to grab it and came back to run off a few shots. She was oblivious, focused on the task at hand, I guess, And I was able to manipulate the leaf to pick up the best light (and also to keep it steady and easier to focus on in the light breeze).

When I came back inside and looked it up in my Kaufman guide to insects, it was shown there as a Box Elder Bug, Boisea trivittata. I thought, Elder? What’s it doing on the maple, then? And it wasn’t alone. A few leaves above it was this solitary individual, who seemed to either be lost or looking for a mate as it roamed from leaf to leaf. A few leaves further I noticed a pair copulating (below). I’m not sure if the larger one is the male (as is traditional in many species) or female (since she’s the egg-layer and needs the size to haul them about). They certainly didn’t seem to feel out of place.

Well, it turns out the Box Elder is actually more often called Boxelder, and is not a type of elder at all, but rather a maple, a member of the genus Acer. The Eastern Boxelder Bug, as it’s called on BugGuide.net, is also sometimes known as the Maple Bug, and will lay its eggs on the foliage, seeds or bark of Boxelder and other maple species, and also ashes. So it wasn’t in fact out of place at all. The nymphs, when they hatch, feed on the seeds of the trees, as well as opportunistically on dead insects. The adults primarily feed on the plant’s juices.

Apparently the adults are most often seen in the fall, but are also around in the spring. BugGuide indicates the spring period is primarily May, so what they’re doing out in late June, I don’t know. It could be that the May date applies to a different area than here, since the species is found across most of North America east of the Rockies. Supposedly they can be a house-invader in late fall, as they’re looking for a place to spend the winter, much like ladybugs, but I don’t think I’ve ever noticed them doing that here.

I left the female to it and she finished up laying. When I checked today there were about ten of these small, soft eggs, no bigger than the head of a pin. I don’t really know, but I would guess that the pale crescent you see on one end of the eggs is akin to the yolk of a bird’s egg – the fertilized cells sit on that, and that’s what the developing embryo uses for food.

Edit: Commenter Ted indicates, “The orange crescent you noted on the bug eggs is actually the outline of the operculum, which is the “cap” of the egg – when the nymph hatches, this cap will pop off and out will crawl the nymph. Eggs of most “true” bugs (order Hemiptera) have these opercula, as far as I can tell.” Thanks, Ted!

The branch was surprisingly full of activity for just a little section of tree. While examining the bugs, I happened to notice a light green caterpillar just a few leaves over. I don’t know what species this is, and I couldn’t even tell you if it was a butterfly or a moth, though I’m inclined to think the former. I used to believe that moth caterpillars were hairy and butterfly caterpillars were smooth, but it turns out that either can be either, and so now I know of no reliable way to differentiate the two. The inchworms, though, those little guys with feet at each end, who inch rather than crawl, those guys are moths, as are the really, really fuzzy ones like the Woolly Bears.

I didn’t notice it at the time, but in looking at the photo as I cropped it down, I spotted a white glob at the back of the caterpillar’s head. I’m fairly certain that this is the egg of a parasitic insect, probably a fly. There are a number of species of flies that lay their eggs at the back of the head of caterpillars, where the caterpillar can’t remove it. When the egg hatches, the larva burrows into the caterpillar’s body, and lives there, without killing the host, until it’s ready to emerge (at which point the host usually dies). Some caterpillars, such as tent caterpillars, have evolved a response of rapidly twitching their front end back and forth when they see a fly so that it’s a much harder target to land on.

Also in the area were many of these fuzzy caterpillars. Again, I don’t know what they are, but they were very brightly coloured, and the density and length of the hairs makes me think moths. There were many different instars, or larval stages, of these caterpillars on the branch, from the fairly mature one above, to a middle-aged and even rather young. On a few leaves I spotted the empty, shed skins (below) of caterpillars as they move from one instar to the next.

It’s amazing how much there is to see when you stop to look; if it hadn’t been for that one bug, laying its eggs on the low-hanging leaf, I would have just walked right on by, thinking the branch was empty.

By the hundreds

Moth jars in fridge

Hundreds of moths

This is my 100th post. It arrived rather quickly, it’s hard to believe I’ve written that many entries already, on subjects as varied as fungus and flora, birds and bugs, earth hour and green parties (the events, not the political groups). I thought the hundredth post deserved special attention, to mark a milestone, but I wasn’t sure how by. I spent some time thinking about it, and finally decided upon a post of hundreds – recent observations of multitudes of whatever it is I’m observing.

I happen to be at my parents’ this week, taking care of the horses while my mom’s away at a conference. Unfortunately, they’re not as easy as goldfish where you sprinkle them some food and they’re good to go for a while. I don’t mind coming out to care for them, though, as it gives me an excuse to visit the countryside. One of the things I use that excuse to do is catch moths, of course. I had a few sheets up last evening, and this. It was on the cooler side overnight last night, about 15 C (60 F), but there was still a good selection of things coming in to the sheets and trap; this evening is warmer and there’s much more activity. Since I need to photograph everything in order to later identify it, I jar the moths I don’t know and tuck them in the fridge. It doesn’t take long for the fridge to fill up. The above photo is the state of things after last night.

Insects on Goatsbeard

Hundreds of bugs

In my mom’s garden there are a couple clumps of goatsbeard (Aruncus dioicus), a perennial native to North America and western Europe. It produces sprays of white flowers, which insects absolutely love. I highly recommend that any budding entomologist buy themselves a goatsbeard for their garden. It gets everything: butterflies, of course, but also day-flying moths, wasps, bees, flies, beetles. You can even find mosquitoes nectaring on the flowers. During the plant’s peak blooming period, which lasts a couple of weeks and is about this time of year, the blooms will be alive with activity, covered in bugs. Hundreds is not an exaggeration here. The longer you stand there, the more you see. It attracts some pretty interesting things.

Beetles

Hundreds of beetles

Earlier in the month I did some mothing down at the research station. Or tried to, anyway. I didn’t actually end up catching very many moths, though I’m not sure why; it was fairly warm that evening. However, what I did end up getting lots of were beetles. In many shapes and sizes, but the most apparent were the June Bugs. These guys aren’t a lot of fun to have come buzzing in to a sheet at the best of times, since they’re clumsy and just as liable to run into you as the sheet. Having about 100 come in to the light was almost creepy. In this photo, those large dark spots are the June Bugs; there are 67 visible on the sheet, and there were easily a few dozen more on the other side, on the ground, and in the nearby vegetation.

Colewort

Hundreds of flowers

The colewort in the garden is also still going strong. Because the plant is ginormous, there are easily hundreds upon hundreds of flowers blooming on it. The colewort attracts a lot of insects, too, and has a fairly strong and pretty scent. Yesterday I watched a few interesting beetles, flies, and a tiger swallowtail dropped by to sample things. This wouldn’t be a bad plant for the garden of an entomologist, either, but it does take up a lot of room.

Chokecherries

Hundreds of berries

I noticed while making the rounds of the garden that the chokecherry tree is beginning to put out its berries. They’re still far from ripe, being a green the same shade as the leaves, but they’re nearly full-size now. The tree is covered in them, and staring up into the canopy creates an interesting effect, almost abstract in appearance.

Hail

Hundreds of hailstones (and raindrops)

The last couple of weeks we’ve had regular, near-daily afternoon thunderstorms. Many of the thunderstorms have included hail, often rather large hail. I tried to take a photo of some of the rather large hail, but couldn’t really capture it any better than this. It’s been strange just how much rain we’ve got this year. I heard something about this June being the wettest on record (so far), but can’t seem to corroborate that. All this rain is especially strange compared to last summer, which was the polar opposite – days upon days of nothing but clear skies and sunshine, not a drop of rain in sight. My parents actually had concerns over their well running low and had to implement a strict water conservation plan. Won’t be an issue this year.

I actually started this post last night (Tuesday), but have been quite busy filling my mom’s shoes while she’s gone. In addition to the dentist appointment, which was quick and went well, but still took a chunk out of my day. I have new respect for the amount of work my mom (or my sister, when she’s here and takes over) puts in around here, especially with the horses. I don’t think I fully appreciated just how much time was involved in caring for them.

In any case. Here’s to another happy hundred.

Emeralds in the garden

When I went out to photograph the wrens, I also poked about the garden a bit. It had rained all afternoon, so all the foliage was damp, but also vibrant. Not much was flying, as far as insect life, and I was mostly looking at the flowers (many of which, after a week of daily rainstorms, were looking a little bedraggled with their heads on the ground). But when I leaned in to the garden edge to peer more closely at something, a cloud of metallic-green damselflies rose from the vegetation, disturbed by my approach.

These may be the first damsels I’ve seen this summer in any numbers. I think I’ve seen the odd one here or there, but not many. Damselflies are the smaller, slimmer cousins of dragonflies, and can be told apart by the general size and chunkiness of their heads and bodies. Also, most damselflies will rest with their wings folded behind their backs, while dragonflies usually rest with their wings spread. These damselflies are the exception, however, and tend to rest with their wings open, though rarely as broad and flat as dragonflies. There are many species that do this, all classified in the group spreadwings.

Dragonflies and damselflies together are part of the order Odonata. There are about 300 species of dragonflies, and 130 species of damselflies in North America north of Mexico. All but two of the 19 North American spreadwings are classified in the genus Lestes. In general they’re associated with the edges of ponds or slow-moving streams. There’s certainly ample water at my parents’, but the garden is some distance from it, so it was interesting to find so many of them there. Many of the spreadwings can be difficult to tell apart from one another, some requiring examination of the genitalia to do so, but I believe these were all Emerald Spreadwings, Lestes dryas.

The females are browner than the males. There are very few species of Odonates where the two sexes are the same or very similar in appearance; generally you can tell them apart fairly readily. However, the surefire way of doing so is to look at the end of the abdomen. Although I didn’t get it in focus in this (or any, as it turned out) photo, you can still get the idea. In males, the abdomen ends in appendages that look like a pair of pincers. These are used to grasp the female gently but firmly around the neck during mating, and two damsels found like this are called “in tandem”. The female has a thicker tip to the abdomen, with a special structure that includes an ovipositor to lay the eggs. The female curves her abdomen around underneath her and touches the tip to a swelling on the underside of the abdomen just behind the male’s thorax (can sort of be seen in the second photo), where she receives the sperm. This is usually called the wheel position, and one can sometimes observe a pair flying together like that.

Spreadwings, like all odonates, are carnivorous predators. Adults have strong mandibles and some of the larger dragonfly species may bite if handled, although it is little more than a strong pinch and doesn’t deliver any venom. They kill their prey by biting it, and “chew” it to ingest it, rather than eating it whole. They eat mainly small flying insects, such as mosquitoes, small flies, and others. The larvae are aquatic, with adults laying their eggs on vegetation, rocks or other substrates at the water’s surface. They look only vaguely like the adults, being not as thin and lacking wings. The larvae eat other aquatic insects, but may even take (very) small fish. Odonates undergo incomplete metamorphosis, meaning they lack the pupa stage that most insects have. Instead, the last larval stage crawls up onto some vegetation, where the skin on the back splits open and the adult climbs out.

Because they’re predatory, both damselflies and dragonflies have excellent eyesight. They have a pair of large compound eyes that are their primary means of detecting prey, but also several occelli across their “forehead” that they use for sensing small changes in light and dark, which helps them to orient upwards. The eyes are another useful feature to separate damsels from dragons – the compound eyes of the latter meet at the top of the head, while those of damselflies are usually widely separated. The eyes are also very important for avoiding predators. Damselflies can be eaten by just about anything larger than themselves. They’re not as strong fliers as dragonflies are, and as a result are often meals for their larger relatives. Adults are also eaten by birds, frogs, and spiders (getting caught in their webs). The nymphs are eaten by larger aquatic insects, amphibians and fish.

Here a male rests on a leaf just above a female. I’m not sure what happened to the male’s abdomen. It’s possible he had a close call with a predator, or when he emerged from his last larval stage his yet-to-harden abdomen was in a funny position. Most insects have very soft exoskeletons when they emerge from metamorphosis. It’s a little like a human baby’s skull – because it has to fit through a very narrow passageway, much of the skull is soft and doesn’t become fully firmed up until the baby is anywhere from nine months to about two years old. In insects the process is necessarily a little quicker – the adult itself may only live a week or two. Insects “wear” their skeletons on the outside, with their muscles attaching to the inner surface, rather than the other way around in vertebrates. The exoskeleton needs to be flexible enough to fit in the cramped space of the pupa or final larval stage, but when the insect emerges, it straightens, wings are expanded by pumping with fluid, and they harden through exposure to air. The air also helps to develop their full colouration, as they are often quite pale when they first emerge.

Unfortunately, there aren’t any really good printed references to the damselflies of North America, which is a funny oversight since there aren’t an overwhelming number of species. Part of the problem is that many can’t be conclusively identified by colouration alone. There are a few good regional field guides, however. In the east, one of the best is A Field Guide to the Dragonflies and Damselflies of Massachusetts, and in the west Introducing the Dragonflies of British Columbia and the Yukon (I’m pretty sure this has damselflies as well, as I recall referencing it while working out there a few years ago – it was part of my employer’s library, but I really liked it).

A few colourful moths

I’m at my parents’ this evening, and it is chilly, unseasonably cool (it seems to me) for a mid-June night, nearly summer. I would ordinarily be outside, checking for moths on the blacklighted sheets I’d have set up, but it’s too cool for that tonight; approaching 10 C (50 F), the moths are, for the most part, tucked into sheltered spots waiting for a warmer night to fly. Since it’s June, there ought to be many nights of 20 C (68 F) temperatures that would be much more ideal. I’ve got my trap running anyway, since it involves very little effort and hey, you never know. But I’m not expecting much when I check it in the morning; the couple times I’ve peeked out the window at it I haven’t seen anything at the sheet I set up behind the light.

In contrast, earlier this month I had some excellent, warm nights. I have yet to see any nights with a sheet covered in moths, but that’s probably just as well – my identification isn’t good enough yet for me to be able to pick through the common stuff to locate the more unusual species, and I would probably feel a little overwhelmed. Even just the couple of busy-ish nights I’ve had, with 50-80 species, have been enough to keep me busy for many hours the next day. Another disadvantage to not knowing anything is that I have to photograph every moth I encounter if I want to identify it, whereas if I already know 40 of those 50 species there’s not much photographing that needs to be done the next day.

The other problem with getting so many moths is trying to choose a select few to post to the blog. With such variety, how do you narrow it down? For the non-moth’er, the large or colourful species are the obvious choices, but even among that group there is quite a selection. I eventually settled on half a dozen that I thought were the most interesting from the last few weeks. Narrowing it down to just the species I had identified helped considerably as well.

The above moth is a Wild Cherry Sphinx (Sphinx drupiferarum), which came to the blacklight at my parents’ last week. I happened to be checking the sheet as it flew in, and I knew something that large had to be a sphinx, so I really wanted to catch it. Unfortunately, I didn’t have my large-moth containers there at the sheet with me. I didn’t trust it to remain (it still hadn’t settled on the sheet, but was buzzing across its surface), so I ended up catching it in one hand, creating a loose cage with my fingers. Good thing I did, too, as it’s a somewhat uncommon species, and one that The Moth Man hadn’t seen before, so we needed photos.

On a similar note, another uncommon species that he hadn’t seen so we needed photos of was this one, the Silver-spotted Ghost Moth. The reason this species isn’t often seen is less due to its abundance, however, and more because of its habits. Most moth’ers attract their moths to some sort of lure, either a UV light or sugary syrup concoctions. This moth rarely comes to lights, so it’s infrequently caught. It has a sort of lekking behaviour, where giant swarms of males form in the evening near the species’ host trees, alders, and female moths will come to check them all out. The moths are most often encountered in these swarms. In the case of my moth, it was the rare individual that did come to check out the light, and I found it sitting in the trap. This species is also unusual in that, taxonomically, it is more closely related to the wee bitty moths than the larger moths, but it itself is about two inches long.

The caterpillar of this moth will be more familiar to most people than the moth itself. This is the adult form of the Wooly Bear caterpillar, that fuzzy, brown and black caterpillar frequently seen in the fall and perceived as a predictor of the nature of the impending winter. For such a distinct-looking caterpillar, the adult is rather bland, although its abdomen has an orange wash to it. The adults are known as Isabella Moths (Pyrrharctia isabella).

There are a number of different species of tiger moths, which are generally characterized by being about an inch in size and fuzzy, with a fuzzy caterpillar stage. The Isabella Moth is part of this group, as is the above, appropriately named the Pink-legged Tiger Moth (Spilosoma latipennis). There are two tiger moths that are nearly entirely snow white, this one and the very similar Agreeable Tiger Moth. The primary difference is in the legs – the Agreeable’s are a yellow-orange instead of pink. I’ve seen a few Agreeables so far this spring, but this was the first Pink-legged I’d caught.

Yet another bunch of tiger moths have black and tan-striped wings. This one is a Harnessed Tiger Moth. There are half a dozen or more species with this sort of pattern, and telling them apart relies on the size of the stripes, the presence of cross-bars, and the colour and pattern of the hindwings. Last week I also caught a Little Virgin Tiger Moth, very similar but for the orangeish rather than pinkish hindwings, and thinner and more numerous stripes.

When Blackburnian and I were at his mom’s place, we went for a walk through the bit of forest that backs onto her property. As we walked we kicked up many moths, about an inch in size and a bland tan colour. They were these guys, Stone-winged Owlets (Chytolita petrealis), so named for the stone colour of their wings (apparently; I think of stones as gray, not beige, personally). The long up-curved “snout” is actually a pair of palps, and are used as sensory organs. Many moths have palps, but they’re more exaggerated in some species than others.

This last one is the subtle but beautiful Unicorn Prominent (Schizura unicornis). I’m not sure why it’s been called unicorn since it has no obvious horn (unlike the previous moth). I love the shades of mocha, peach, olive and teal in the wings of this moth. I couldn’t get him to do it again for the photo, but while he was sitting in the little jar I had him in he had his hind end and wings tightly furled together and raised up in the air, like a bit of peeling bark. The prominents are a varied bunch, with some mottled like this one, others smooth and sleek, and still others rather fuzzy like the tiger moths.

As usual, if you’re interested in browsing some of the other species I’ve caught, check out my moths photoset on Flickr.