Watch Out, Stephen Curry, Moths Have Hand-Eye Coordination, too

A hawkmoth ready to uncurl that proboscis into a nectary (Photo: Anna Stöckl)

by Richard Conniff

I have mixed feelings about sphingid moths, sometimes called sphinx moths because the position their caterpillars commonly assume is said to resemble the Great Sphinx of Giza (but I don’t see it). I prefer to call them hummingbird moths, or just plain hawkmoths. On the one hand, I am deeply prejudiced against some of them for a selfish reason: One of the most dismaying experiences for any vegetable gardener is to step out one morning in late July, just as the luscious and long-awaited tomatoes are coming due–and discover the stems and branches of the tomato plants suddenly stripped bare of leaves. The culprit is the caterpillar of the five-spotted hawkmoth (Manduca quinquemaculata), and they are wonderfully camouflaged to keep their enemies (me, among others) from finding them.

It’s some consolation to find caterpillars after parasitic wasps have already gotten to them. You can see the caterpillar’s body ornamented with the pearly pupae of the next wasp generation. (See the photo at left.) Those I leave where they are, for the budding young wasps to emerge and destroy other tomato hornworms, the ones I haven’t managed to find. The hornworms I find in good health, them I murder.

OK, I’ve gotten that off my chest. The truth of course is that I should not generalize. There are many other species of hawkmoth (1450 of them) that are entirely innocent of molesting my tomato plants. So let’s move on.

I admire hawkmoths mainly for the speed and purposefulness of their flight, the way they whip from plant to plant almost like hummingbirds, with that same motor-like whirring of their wings. Their wingbeat, up to 80 times a second, is actually faster than a hummingbird’s And then there’s the needle-thin proboscis they use for sucking up nectar from flowers. It’s as long as, and sometimes much longer than, the rest of the hawkmoth’s body. 

Triassic Butterfly Park: Oldest Fossil Unhinges Flower-Pollinator Timeline

Modern Glossata

By Richard Conniff/Scientific American

For years, researchers studying core samples drilled from deep in the Earth have noticed odd flecks of material, possibly from insects—and generally treated them as a distraction from the real work: They focused instead on pollen and spores as a continuous record for understanding past ecosystems. But a surprising abundance of those flecks in a recent sample from northern Germany has now led a team of researchers to pay closer attention.

Writing in the journal Science Advances, Timo van Eldijk and his co-authors describe their find as the earliest fossil record of Lepidoptera, from about 201 million years ago, at the boundary between the Triassic and Jurassic periods. The new find fits the timeline for evolution of the Lepidoptera suggested by molecular evidence and helps correct a puzzling gap in the fossil record.

Triassic Wing Scale

The study looks at 70 specimens, found in a drill core from more than 300 meters below the surface, and identifies them as the wing scales that give butterflies and moths their spectacularly varied colors and patterns.  A light microscope, and later a scanning electron microscope, revealed the scales to be petal-like structures.  Some of them are beautifully preserved, with neatly ridged surfaces, herringbone webbing between the ridges, “micro-ribs,” and in some cases, perforations in the surface.

The perforations turned out to be a critical detail. They indicate, according to the co-authors, that a moth of that period had the hollow wing scales characteristic of Glossata, the taxonomic group that includes all modern moths and butterflies equipped with a sucking proboscis. The oldest previously known such fossil was from 129 million years ago–just as the flowering plants were making their spectacular emergence across the planet.  And the accepted theory was that the sucking proboscis only emerged at that point as a product of co-evolution between flowers and the insects that pollinate them.

That co-evolution, and the often exquisitely precise matchup between flower and pollinator, have been a subject of perennial fascination for naturalists.  In one of the most celebrated stories in all of botany, for instance,

The Biological Warfare of Very Small Wasps

This is how a home invader looks to a caterpillar (Photo: José L. Fernández-Triana)

My latest for Takepart, the website of the movie company Participant Media:

Earlier this year, a study came out describing a new plant species in the Andes that is the sole home of an estimated 40 or 50 kinds of insects. I thought that had a certain “wow” factor. It also seemed like a chance to write about “keystone species”—the ones on which whole ecosystems depend—and the ripple effects when such a species goes extinct.

So I asked for a comment from evolutionary ecologist Dan Janzen at the University of Pennsylvania, and he responded with characteristic pith and vinegar. “You tell me what species on the planet is not an important part of the life cycle of many tens to hundreds of other species,” he demanded. “As for so-called keystone species, that simply means a species whose removal or other kind of perturbation happens to create a set of ripples big enough for a two-meter-tall, diurnal, nearly deaf, nearly dumb, nearly odor-incompetent, nearly taste-incompetent, urban invasive species”—that would be us, Homo sapiens—“to see, or bother to see, the ripple.” I let that project slide.

But a new study out this week in the journal Zookeys gives me a better idea of what Janzen was getting at. It describes 186 new species in northwestern Costa Rica, all parasitic wasps, the largest of them about half the length of my pinkie nail, and most—at one to five millimeters—much smaller. They’re certainly too small for most people to notice and too obscure to care about—except perhaps that each is a deadly master of a macabre kind of biological warfare.

First, the background. For more than 30 years, ecologists and parataxonomists—the foot soldiers in the science of species discovery—have been methodically prowling the

The Romantic Moth

Moths do it. (Photo: Raiwen)

This photo caught my eye, on the eve of Valentine’s Day.  I’m maybe leaping to a conclusion that these lovely creatures are having sex.  It’s possible, I suppose, that the male is just hanging on afterward for a tiresome interlude of mate-guarding.  But the species is named Amata alicia, which in my high school Latin translates as “the beloved Alicia.”  So I am going with romance.

The photo, by Raiwen, was taken in grassland, in the Sudano Guinean Tree Savanna Region, Moyenne Guinée, Guinea, West Africa.  It’s part of a Field Guide to the Moths of Africa on Flickr