Just back from a few weeks in Australia. As well as wombats and Koalas and a lot of birds I was keen to see some moths. So I inspected motel lights etc. Didn’t see any bat-sized mega-moths, but there were lots of dinky little creatures, of odd shapes and forms, often very beautiful. Good examples of geographical isolation and parallel evolution. Best of all were the Crambids. I enclose a Yuletide picture of one – an Acentropine species but I suppose I’ll never be able to give it an exact name. There are 22,000 species of moths in Australia, of which nearly half have never been named, and there are no textbooks or field guides (unbelievable!). At least when we catch a moth we have a fighting chance of putting a name to it!
Happy Christmas to all, and good mothing for 2017!
Tony H.
Tony,
there is a public Facebook page called ‘Moths and Moth-watching’. If you post images of moths from anywhere in the world there with an ID request you will most probably get an identification. I lived in Australia as a child. The most spectacular recollections of Lepidoptera for me at that young age was the masses of Southern Painted Lady butterfies plus a huge ‘Eye-spotted’ moth that turned up indoors. We lived in the Adelaide region. There are actually web sites that show Australian moths. Looking at the CSIRO Australian Moths Online web site this moth you have photoed looks like Talanga tolumnialis.
Thanks Raymond.
Not sure if I can face Facebook (I’ve never joined it, or Twitter etc). However, last weekend I spent some time trying out Australian websites and found one (called leapfrogoz!) which was quite useful. The moth I featured in my blog certainly seems to be T tolumnialis, and I’ve also nailed a few others.
The Australian Painted lady is still as common as you remember. Slightly darker than ours and with blue spots on the hindwing. I suppose your ‘eye-spotted’ moth was a silkmoth, but I did see one biggish brown moth with eyes, which they call the Granny moth (or Australian Old Lady)!
Tony.
I visited that site once and couldn’t cope with the text colour. Not sure what my eyed moth was. There is a site that shows moths of the Adelaide area where we lived but it didn’t resemble any of those as I remember it.