Carpet damage caused by moth larvae

The house is currently in disarray as we clean behind the furniture, relentlessly vacuuming and washing the carpet. The adults moths have (we hope!) all been killed but I forgot to take a photo to check the identity, although I am fairly certain that the moths are Tinea pellionella, the case-bearing clothes moth.

I did manage to get a photo of the actual cause of the damage:

The culprit: a caterpillar of Tinea pellionella; the case was around 1cm long.

The larvae are the life stage which eat fabric and they move around in a portable case which reminds me of caddisflies. We will need to keep looking for adults to prevent the laying of more eggs but hopefully we have killed or removed most of the larvae.

Huertas collected S. ackeryi during an expedition to Columbia, but it wasn’t until the unidentified butterfly was compared with a museum specimens that entomologist realised it was the same as a 90 year old unidentified museum specimen. One of the distinguishing features of S. ackeryi which helped with the identification were its extremely hairly mouthparts.

I first read about this in a ScienceDaily article.

You can view some photographs on the NHM news page.

The original article (abstract only) was published in Science but you can read a summary on the New Scientist website.

Reference:

Barbero F., Thomas J.A., Bonelli S., Balletto E. and Schönrogge K. (2009) Queen Ants Make Distinctive Sounds That Are Mimicked by a Butterfly Social Parasite. Science 323: 782-785

A Cybertaxonomy Discussion: Vince Smith has posted a blog response to concerns a fellow taxonomy blogger (Roderic Page) has with Scratchpads, the online taxonomy database used by Vince & the NHM, and the potential for redundant data and time wasting when trying to gather information from multiple Scrathpads. Instead, Page sugguests using Semantic MediaWikis which would be able to deal with human-language queries on bulk taxonomic/entomological information, such as “Which Hemiptera might I find in Essex during July?” or “How many beetles are there excluding weevils?”.

Whilst I don’t want to reiterate the posts, I am inclined to agree with Vince’s view from my experience with taxonomists/entomologists at museums and people who are happier working with paper rather than computers. With so much taxonomic information not readily accessible in any form I think Scratchpads & similar more traditionally organised databases will become more commonly used before the more (conceptually) advanced Semantic MediaWikis.

Scanning Moths: There are some excellent scanned images of moths over at cicindela,  which have even managed to capture individual scales at a reasonable resolution!

I’d recommend visiting cicindela as the author as plenty of other good photographs.

Cincindela and iPhylo have been added to the blogroll.

Like most phasmids you can easily see sexual dimorphism: the female is much larger than the male.

Mnesilochus sp. male (left) & female (right)

The female seems especially cryptic as she has a nobbly bit on her abdomen and usually angles her thorax when resting.

Mnesilochus abdominal extrusion

They have already started laying eggs which I shall photograph when I have better light.

Entomology News: Today BBC News had a top story titled ” Liberia worms swarm ‘emergency’ “. For a moment I was really curious, thinking they were talking about annelids before realising they meant army worms, the vernacular for particularly voracious caterpillars! The swarm of caterpillars is the worst Liberia has seen in over 30 years and they are currently undertaking aerial spraying in an attempt to control the insects.

I came across a more positive story from Monash University on some research undertaken by Dr Adrian Dyer on the responses of bees to human faces. They found that the bees could ‘average’ different views of the human face (0° and 60°) to recognise a previously unseen facial angle (30°). The research team think the study may help with the construction of AI facial recognition.

Update: You can read the full research article on bee vision at the PloS ONE website.

Langdon nature reserve has managed their meadows with periodic sheep and cattle grazing, preventing growth of young trees and the more rapidly growing plants and grasses, allowing smaller plants survive. This meadow management has allowed the populations of P. malvae to increase.

Little Haven nature reserve has a growing colony of M. athalia along a managed area of coppiced trees under power lines which also has lots of Common Cow-wheat, Melampyrum pratense, one of the main foodplants for the species. As this is a UK BAP priority species with decreasing distribution and populations, this is fantastic news.

Reference:
Wisbey, J. (2008) Grizzled Skippers at Langdon, Essex Wildlife, November 2008, No. 77.
Grimshaw, S. (2008) Heath Fritillary now well established at Little Haven nature reserve, Essex Wildlife, November 2008, No. 77.