#THAT’S LIKE THIRTEEN FUCKING PERCENT OF ALL OF LEPIDOPTERA | Explore Tumblr posts and blogs

laurelnose · 11 months ago

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I wondered why every time I see a cool moth it seems to be a geometer so I looked it up and uh. There are 23,000 described species of geometer moth?? So the cool ones always being geometrids checks out statistically I guess?? Man. I don’t know how lepidopteran taxonomists do it but that is Too Many. Twenty Three Thousands is too many species for a single family. That’s bonkers. Have y’all considered maybe elevating some of those subfamilies to families.

#the species distribution in Geometroidea is HYSTERICAL #there’s like ~700 uraniids 30 sematurids 30 epicopeiids 2 pseudobistonids #and TWENTY THREE FUCKING THOUSAND GEOMETRIDS #THAT’S LIKE THIRTEEN FUCKING PERCENT OF ALL OF LEPIDOPTERA #WHAT IS THIS!!!!!#im going to give everyone the benefit of the doubt and assume the phylogenetics are robust bc i don’t care enough to look it up #even so... man. no. that’s too many. it’s Too Many #ONE PERCENT OF ALL SPECIES OF EVERYTHING EVERYWHERE ARE IN FAMILY GEOMETRIDAE #laurelnose.txt

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