35.8104 years in science communication
TL:DR – There are numerous green moths, they have evolved to mimic leaves and so evade predators through a simple camouflage mechanism. Green Silver-lines is a lovely example of a green moth.
Some moth names are just so obvious. This member of the Lepidoptera is mostly green and has silvery lines on its wings, hence Green Silver-lines. It’s scientific binomial is a little more cryptic, Pseudoips prasinana.
Regular Sciencebase readers have probably been wondering what happened to our newly re-dug pond, which I did in April 2019 after a twenty year filled in dry spell. Well, it has thrived and become quite the wildlife haven, attended frequently by garden birds for bathing and drinking. We have at least five frogs (I saw five sitting around the perimeter one evening early in the Covid-19 lockdown). [UPDATE 2022: Matt has been counting frogs most evenings, 19 in and around the pond one night in July]
There are endless aquatic snails now, they multiplied very quickly. Lots of plants, which are also thriving, and lots of invertebrates attracted including Common Blue Damselfly.
We had mimulus in bloom and yellow flag iris, I did mention them previously in an in-post update, and as of today, a solitary lily blossom. Here are a couple of closeups of the lily with invertebrate visitors.
Meanwhile, the wilding of the patch of garden next to the pond I’d attempted, and doubled in size this year by removing turf has worked quite well with lots of Purple Tansy, Viper’s bugloss, Foxflove, Cornflower, Earth Smoke, and various poppies, Purple Toadflax, and a few other nameless wild brassica species and more.
Finally, the common corncockle (Agrostemma githago) has grown and bloomed, I was worried I wouldn’t see any, but there it is, hopefully it will self-seed on this patch, but I will harvest some for next year and for the front garden wild patch too, which is three times the area it was last year. I wrote about it recently but the plant I’d seen in the wild patch was actually Viper’s Bugloss.
This is the largest of the resident Lepidoptera of The British Isles: the Privet Hawk-moth, Sphinx ligustri. As its scientific name suggests, this is one of what are commonly known as Sphinx moths in the US and elsewhere. This species can have a wingspan of up to 120 millimetres when its wings are full extended.
At the other extreme of size scale is the Satin Grass-veneer, Crambus perlella, is one of the smaller of our moths, oh not the smallest by a long chalk. It is by definition a micro moth, but the division between micro and macro moths (such as the Privet Hawk-moth above) isn’t, as one might assume, about size but rather the position of the animal on the evolutionary family tree.
As I understand it, what we might term the oldest species, the more “primitive” moths are grouped as the micros. This perhaps bizarrely includes all of the butterflies as micro moths. The macros are then a second evolutionary wave that came millions of years later. Many micro moths around the world are much bigger than the Privet Hawk-moth and many are larger still than some of the much bigger tropical macro moths.
Large Skipper, Ochlodes sylvanus, in flight. My old Canon 6D full-frame digital SLR would never have locked focus quickly enough to get a shot like this. This was taken from about 3 or 4 metres away with a 600mm zoom on a Canon 7D mkii. f/6.3, 1/1600s, ISO 500. I should’ve used a faster shutter speed to freeze the wings as they flap very quickly in this skippy little butterfly.
The 2/3rds cropped sensor of this camera gives the Sigma lens the equivalent “reach” of a 900mm lens, i.e. nominally 50 percent longer focal length. This is an arbitrary fact really, it’s not optical zoom, it’s equivalent to digital zoom on a pocket camera. The photo is also cropped to a much smaller square. Nevertheless, with a similar number of pixels on the smaller sensor and ignoring edge effects, which are negligible except in extremely tightly cropped images, this is far superior to something the 6D would manage.
For those who wonder what the difference is between butterflies and moths, there is none. According to Lepidopterist David Slade asking what is the difference between butterflies and moths is like asking what is the difference between ladybirds and beetles. The butterflies are simply a sub-group of the so-called micro moths (generally considered to be “less evolved” than the macro moths, with a few exceptions), just as any other sub-group within the Lepidoptera (Noctuidae, Pyralidae, Erebidae, Geometridae` is).
The butterflies as a group of moths, however, do differ from all the others, micro and macro in that they lack a mechanical coupling that hooks forewing to hindwing.
A friend tipped me off that he’d spotted an unusual plant species, Anacamptis pyramidalis, the pyramidal orchid, in our local woodland. It’s in a very prominent spot where lots of people walk their dogs so was unlikely to last long. I headed there this morning to do my first botanical “twitch”.
Took a Canon 6D and a Tamron 90mm macro with a tripod and a flash to try and get a decent close-up or two. I didn’t even think to sniff it, but apparently it has a “foxy” scent.
In the past, when I’m lecturing a friend at the pub about the moths I’ve photographed, the terms micro and macro come up and the inevitable question: “Oh, are the micros just the small ones, then?”. As a relative newbie moth-er I’ve struggled to offer a definitive answer. Some moths referred to as micro moths are a lot bigger than some of the smaller macros and some of the macro moths like the “footman” moths and pugs are smaller than some of the micros. Mothing experts have pointed me to papers and articles about identification and one contact suggest that the distinction is in the genitalia…therein lies the clue.
Size isn’t everything, in fact it’s nothing. The micro and macro distinction is nothing, absolutely nothing, to do with size as one might assume given the definition and etymology of those words. No, instead it’s all about evolutionary complexity. The micro moths are essentially the oldest, least evolved part of the Lepidoptera family tree.
All moths and butterflies evolved from a common ancestor about 250 million years ago, same common ancestor as the caddisflies. The micro-moth category includes all the species that evolved from circa 250 to 200 million years ago. The macro-moths are the moths that evolved more recently – from about 125 million years ago – once flowering plants first blossomed. Indeed, nocturnal pollination by moths is more common than daytime pollination by other types of insect.
Butterflies are in evolutionary terms just a sub-group of the micro-moths dating back to perhaps between 110 and 65 million years ago. All butterflies share a common micro-moth ancestor.
There are approximately 160 000 described species of Lepidoptera on the planet still living today, at least 62 000 of those are the micro-moths.
The red-footed falcon, Falco vespertinus, is usually found in eastern Europe and Asia but its numbers are falling because of habitat loss (what a surprise) and hunting (ditto). It is usually migrates south to Africa in the Winter. Occasionally vagrants are seen in western Europe in the summer.
Interestingly, one has been hanging around this last week or so at RSPB Fen Drayton, which is close to a village not far from us here in Cottenham. It’s apparently a first-year female so obviously not the same bird that has been seen on the same patch in previous years. We paid a visit to the reserve today and although light levels were poor for photography and the bird was perching on fence posts about 400-500 metres away from the guided busway that runs through the site, we got a good view of her and a few photos for the gallery.
The whole time we were watching a Cetti’s Warbler was calling noisily from the trees behind us and there was a cuckoo doing its cuckoo thing not much further along the trees parallel to the busway.
Once home again, I heard on the birding grapevine that a Fulmar (a seabird many kilometres away from its normal range, although they do breed in Hunstanton in North Norfolk, apparently) had been seen flying over the woodland that nestles in the farmland between us and our village neighbour. There is also a Marsh Warbler showing nicely at NT Wicken Fen. This species usually spends the summer in Continental Europe (not Iberia, France, nor Italy though) and is another interesting vagrant to this area. One has to wonder whether lockdown and our changing habits and reduced activity over the last few weeks is changing the habits of some of these avian species.
Later in the summer of 2020, NASA will launch its latest Mars rover, Perseverance. To coincide with that important scientific occasion, Elizabeth Howell, PhD and Nicholas Booth have told the greatest scientific detective story of all time in The Search for Life on Mars. Their approach and style are unique, they break many a convention of the scientific history books to make this truly accessible read with none of the bluff and bluster of so many so-called popular-science books and all of the guts and glory of a gripping wouldbe bestseller.
The world next door, otherwise known as the Red Planet, has intrigued humanity for centuries. From ancient astronomical observations to the science fiction of the modern era HG Wells’ The War of the Worlds to Andy Weir’s The Martian and to the amazing photography of the robotic rovers Curiosity and Opportunity.
For the first time in forty years, the missions heading to Mars – from the USA and China – will look for signs of ancient life. This is the latest chapter in the story of the Red Planet where fact is stranger than fiction, myths and false starts abound while red herrings and bizarre coincidences astound. Here are the triumphs and the heartbreaking failures.
This is the definitive story of how life’s extraterrestrial discovery has eluded us to date and how it will be found somewhere and sometime this century. The Search for Life on Mars is based on more than a hundred interviews with experts at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory and elsewhere, who share their insights and stories.
The Search for Life on Mars: The Greatest Scientific Detective Story of All Time by Elizabeth Howell, PhD and Nicholas Booth, Arcade Publishing; On sale: 23rd June 2020 | ISBN: 9781950691395 US edition here | UK edition here
If you came looking for my cover version of Life on Mars, the Bowie song, you can find it here.
A few more moth species from the actinic lure showing the great diversity of shapes and forms and markings
