#snowberry clear wing

[lunarlotuscove]

Snowberry clearwings are absolutely breathtaking, you'd think as I live close to the main area they are (Chesapeake Bay region) I'd have seen them more, and to be fair I likely have, however these guys are fast and good at their camouflage, I am determined to catch them in better quality sometime

Sunday September 15th 2024 11:02-11:15am

[libraryofmoths]

Moth of the Week

Hummingbird Clearwing Moth

Hemaris thysbe

The hummingbird clearwing moth is a part of the family Sphingidae or the hawkmoth family and was first described by Johan Christian Fabricius in 1775. The name Hemaris Thysbe is thought to be a reference to Thisbe, one of the doomed lovers in Ovid's Metamorphoses, due to the color of Thisbe’s blood-stained scarf and the maroon color of the moth. Additionally, the name hummingbird clearwing is due to the humming noise created by the rapid flapping of the moth’s transparent wings.

Description The hummingbird clearwing moth typically has an olive green and maroon back with a white or yellow and maroon underside. It has pale legs and no stripes, which is how you tell this moth apart from other in its genus, Hemaris. Its wings are transparent with a maroon border. After hatching, the hummingbird clearwing’s wings are a fully opaque dark red to black. Then the wing’s scales fall off when the moth takes flight, resulting in a clear wing with maroon borders and visible veins. However, a moth’s color and wing patterning varies between individual moths. For example, moths born in the south or later in the mating season are darker in color, and different populations have varying wing border shapes.

Average wingspan of 4.75 cm (≈1.9 in)

Up to 70 wingbeats per second

Can fly up to 12 mph (≈19.3 kph)

Diet and Habitat When in their caterpillar stage, these moths eat the leaves of cherry trees, European cranberry bushes, hawthorns, dogbane, honeysuckle, and snowberry bushes. Adult hummingbird moths feed on the nectar from flowers such as the Wild Bergamot and beebalm, red clovers, lilacs, phloxs, snowberry, cranberry, blueberry, vetch and thistle. The hummingbird clearwing prefers purple and pink flowers. They use their long proboscis or feeding tube to collect nectar from the flowers while flying in front of it like a hummingbird.

The average proboscis is 20 mm (≈0.8 in)

These moths are the most common in southern Ontario and the eastern United States. Their habitat ranges from Alaska to Oregon in the west and from Newfoundland to Florida in the east. They migrate northward from April to August and southward in late spring and the fall. They inhabit forests, meadows, and suburban gardens.

Mating The hummingbird clearwing has two broods a year in the south, but only one in the north. Mating takes place in May and June as females attract males with pheromones produce from glands at the tip of the abdomen. Female hummingbird moths will lay 200 eggs that will hatch in only 6 to 8 days.

Predators Hummingbird moths and caterpillars in general are hunted by birds, mantids, spiders, bats. To help protect themselves, these types of moths resemble hummingbirds or bees to fool predators.

Fun Fact Adults hummingbird clearwing moths are most active during the hottest parts of the day and have no hearing abilities due to a lack of “hearing organs.”

(Source: Wikipedia, Life On CSG Pond, United States Department of Agriculture, Georgia Wildlife Federation, Beyond Pest Control)

[ladyswillmart]

Here, I got BUGS for yas!

First up is a hummingbird clearwing moth, a diurnal species who never seems to stop moving. Sometimes we call these "flying lobsters" but they really do resemble hummingbirds! Apparently when they are fresh out of the cocoon, they actually have dark scales on their wings, but they beat their wings so fast and so much that all the scales fall off, giving them a clear appearance.

We have these in abundance, along with their relative, the snowberry clearwing, which is smaller and closer in appearance to a bumblebee. We also have (in much smaller numbers) the very similar appearing graceful clearwing, but you can differentiate these by the color of their legs (hummingbird clearwing has white legs, while the graceful has sort of brownish ones).

Also appearing here is a carpenter bee male; you can tell from the white spot on his head! And also the beneficial blue-winged wasp, which appears in large numbers in Virginia around this time. Indeed, I saw several of them congregating around this overgrown oregano plant.

[mysticmothworld]

Moth wings - strategies to avoid predation

Hide and seek (cryptic colouration) and/or hide and seek but I dress up as the thing I'm hiding on (Wasmannian mimicry)

Pictured: a peppered moth and a wave sphinx moth

'Yeah I'm poisonous, look at my scary bright colors' (aposematism) and/or 'Yeah I'm poisonous, I'm similarly coloured to another poisonous moth which you've eaten before so no need to eat me' (Mullerian mimicry)

Pictured: a female leopard magpie moth, a garden tiger moth and several six-spot burnet moths

'Duh I'm poisonous!! I look like [insert other poisonous insect or animal], but please don't test your theory by biting me otherwise you'll find out I'm not actually poisonous' (Batesian mimicry)

Included in the medley: a wasp mimic (male red oak clearwing), a bumblebee mimic (snowberry clearwing) and a spider mimic (a petrophila species)

Image sources:

Sidenote: I hate formatting posts on mobile eeghhhh

https://le.kloofconservancy.org.za/lockdown-an-opportunity-to-appreciate-your-local-biodiversity/

[paledoptera]

Glad you liked the snowberry clearwing suggestion! Big flashy ones like a lot of saturniids are somewhat hard to come by here (one of the more notable instances I've been able to find is the time someone found a cecropia cocoon in the woods and it ended up on the news because nobody who saw it initially knew what it Was lmao), so we've got a lot of smaller, less distinct (or at least less well known) ones - That clearwing is probably the most unique of them, but there's some others that are relatively notable, I think!

We've got a few sphinx moths - While at the mall this past summer, I had an encounter with a lettered sphinx, namely one with a reddish spot on the back like the one in sighting 1347349 on butterfliesandmoths (dot) org, but I would argue the one that leaves the most impression after the clearwing is the white-lined sphinx! They're another one that's fairly commonly referred to as a hummingbird moth, despite not being closely related to the hummingbird hawk-moth of Eurasia - A lot of sphinx moths around here have similar sizes and flight patterns to hummingbirds and also tend to hover around flowers when feeding, so they're all largely lumped in as "hummingbird moths" by casual observers, but the white-lined sphinx is probably the one most commonly referred to as such.

Outside of the sphinx moths, a REALLY distinct family we have here are the plume moths - They have a frankly bizarre shape to them, with a long, thin body almost more resembling a dragonfly than a moth in shape, and long, thin wings near the front of the body, so that, when at rest, they form an almost T shape. There's a few different species here, but the most common one I've seen is the morning glory plume moth - There's usually one or two hanging out on my front door during the warm months at night! Weird little dudes, they give me robber fly "what the fuck is that??? what IS that?????" vibes.

As far as smaller, less distinct moths go, there's a few here that are better known for their status as caterpillars than the moths themselves - We have both Isabella tiger moths and Virginian tiger moths here, better known as the wooly bear and yellow wooly bear in their larval forms, respectively! There's also the American dagger moth, which has a rather nondescript appearance as an adult, but a very distinct one in its larval form! As caterpillars, they've got a very dark face, and are covered in pretty vivid yellow yellow hairs, with a few black tufts that resemble spikes - There are some reports of skin irritation from their hairs, but they're seemingly non-venomous!

Another moth larvae that causes skin irritation, this time due to their hairs being toxic to humans, is the brown-tail moth! They're not native to the US, but there is a population in New England after they were introduced, and they've been particularly widespread where I live for the past decade - In 2018, the front wall of my then-workplace was absolutely COVERED in the adult moths, which are white with, as the name implies, brown tails (sometimes bordering on reddish). A few of them actually made their way into the building, and I brought them back outside - Interestingly, they lose the toxins in their hairs after they pupate, so adults don't cause a rash the way the caterpillars do! They used to be significantly more widespread through eastern North America, but they've declined for... not-fully-clear reasons, but one theory suggests that their population was suppressed by parasitic fly species introduced to counter ANOTHER introduced moth, the spongy moth (Whose scientific name is lymantria dispar! The name spongy moth is a relatively new one for it, so you may find more documentation using its scientific name than its common one. It was formerly known by another common name, but that name also happens to include a slur, so! I'm gonna make the choice to Not include that here 👍👍👍)! They've got some neat sexual dimorphism going on - In addition to the relatively common antennae size difference, males are a light brownish color, while females are a rather bright white with sort of rippled brown striping on the wings! I personally think the females stand out as more flashy than the males, which is neat to see, as someone who also gets a kick out of birds, where the opposite is often true - Usually in birds males are the ones with the more flashy plumage, or at the very least, females tend to have more spotted or mottled colorations in species with dimorphism, to help keep them more hidden while nesting. Even species with relatively little dimorphism beyond size tend to display this pattern - Common barn owls, for instance, can often be differentiated by spotting on the breast and the color of the feathering around the facial disc, where females tend to have heavier black spotting than males (whose breasts are often white with no spotting at all, though they get speckling occasionally) and also have darker facial disc feathers. (I follow an artist in the UK who has livestreams of the raptors that use the nest boxes in his garden, and he works alongside a rehabber who visits when their hatchlings get old enough - Some of the species he has are hard to differentiate even as adults by visual alone, but for barn owls, those are the standard ways of sexing owlets when they're getting their ID rings. But that's getting a bit off topic lol)

Anyway, the male spongy moths veer a bit in to LBJ territory, to borrow a birding term (LBJ stands for "little brown job" and is sometimes used by birders to refer to those fairly common brown birds that are difficult to distinguish - Trying to tell sparrows apart at a glance, for example), which is where a lot of the other moths here fall into. A lot of them aren't especially distinct, often various browns and greys - I'd say even that lettered sphinx I mentioned at the start probably falls into that territory if you're not as Normal About Bugs And Birds As Me. We do have one seemingly-LBJ moth that stands out off the top of my head, though - Amphipyra pyramidoides, or the copper underwing of the US (a distinct species from the copper underwing of the palaearctic), looks like a pretty unremarkable LBJ when its wings are folded up at rest, but as the name implies, the underwings have a distinct copper color that can be seen with their wings outstretched! Underwing moths have a bunch of species with that trait of colorful lower wings, highly recommend poking through them if you have a chance.

Anyway, that's a bit long, so TLDR: I'm Just A Touch Autistic and had a bit too much time at work with the snow this morning keeping customers away and yelling about moths is how I opted to spend the slow day, I suppose bfnfngmdngndn No pressure to read all of that if you haven't already, or to respond to it, naturally! I just get a kick out of cramming excessive amounts of words about bbugs (and bbirds) through my ISP's wires haha. Thanks again for the moths, and I'm glad to hear you're recovering well! And I gotta say, even if they're intended as a sort of quicker and easier, tiding things over while you're sick solution between the more detailed pieces (which are Very Good, for the record), I also love the ms paint moffs tbh. Iconic.

i don't know who you are anon but i love you thank you for putting an entire ass essay about moths in my inbox i knew about a lot of these species (because i'm a nerd who does a lot of research about shit) but i didn't actually know about plume moths!! they look really cool, def gonna draw them at some point.

they remind me of like, dragon wings or bat wings

[illumiera]

heehee 💌 and 😍 for the beloved ellie :)

from this ask game! ✨

💌How would they plan a romantic evening for a significant other?

Elentari's a total romantic, but she's also very much a dragon-soul. if she's planning an evening for Miraak, I can see her packing her enchanted bag—wine and tankards to drink from, cheeses, sweet pastries, snowberries of course, chocolates, as well as a blanket—and taking wing with Dragon Aspect, then flying with him to one of her favourite lakeside nature spots where they can have a picnic and watch the sun go down. if the aurora borealis don't come out on their own, that's nothing a quick Shout of Clear Skies can't change. maybe they'll stargaze and sleep beneath the constellations, too... 🥰

😍: What does your OC find irresistible in others?

a big thing for Ellie is intelligence, as well as good conversation skills—she'd love to be able to feel comfortable just to sit in companionable silence and exist with someone, but she also needs to be able to have good, interesting talks, to share ideas and stories, to learn something new. a person who can talk well into the night with her, who never wants to stop learning and exploring and seeing things, who'll maybe use their knowledge of all things literature and language to write her notes and poems? oh, they've unlocked a surefire way into her heart!

[johndoeswords]

The Tail of Walther & Wilhelm (an excerpt)

Walther’s wet eyes watered more in the wind. Tiny snowflakes kicked up into his whiskers and landed on his snout. He grimaced in the cold, a single breath of wind skated across the desolate cemetery, cut through his now-not-so-thick seeming sweater, and disappeared into the dark woods beyond the wrought iron gate on the other side of the clearing.

Walther waddled up onto the hard base on which the concrete fairy sat unmoving. 

Lifting himself onto his hind legs with his tail strung out behind him for balance, just its tip still touching the ground behind, he placed his paws up on the edge of the frozen basin.

In the bowl half full of glassy white ice a small pool showed no reflection, only a clouded crackled translucence that obscured the concrete bottom beneath.

He looked again into the fairy’s stone eyes, level with his this time, and straight-on. Swallowing hard, he couldn’t help but smell a life beneath the cold surface. He’d heard the stories but wasn’t fool enough to have ever tried following their lead. They were told as heed, not instruction. 

The fairy’s face smirked - or maybe it was cast in a smirk and Walther just noticed now that he was face-to-face with the thing - he heaved a sigh and looked down into the frozen water in the basin. Lifting his head back up to look into the creature’s eyes one last time, he finally managed a word - whispered.

“Please”

The stone creature’s eyes glinted. This time Walther knew he wasn’t imagining the change. Slowly, they seemed to smooth and fill, melting the rough worn concrete into a glassy black. The eyes were like frozen pools themselves, only filled with an inky blackness not in any water Walther would ever care to drink. The eyes focused into a single dark color and stared deeply into the possum’s purse-lipped face.

The stone fairy did not move its lips but Walther heard the reply all the same: “What do you seek?”

Walther’s mind raced. Had this been what his brother had seen? What did Walther seek, really? A nice pile of leaves, a bit of snowberry missed by the birds, a small hole that would fit his head and body and not let a fox find him, a bowl of eggs and pecans, a thousand things… 

It took a moment for him to regain his composure. He knew the answer. He had practiced it in his dreams, in his nightmares, on his walk to the cemetery which had felt like both.

“A den from the cold”, he replied.

A small part of him wished he’d said nothing. Wished he’d turned around. Wished he’d not even noticed his brother was missing.

The larger part of him, his stomach that usually just stored the pit, felt suddenly swimmy and weightless. Every hair on the possum's body stood on end. It felt like lightning just about to strike, but never cracking. He looked into the basin and saw its contents melting, moving, like a pot of oil on a hot stove, struck by an undercurrent of heat but still and quiet on the surface. The basin itself had smoothed and turned from its rough concrete into a shining silver. 

The possum’s back feet lifted off the stone underneath him and he clung to the edge of the basin, gasping now instead of sighing. 

He stared into the fairy’s black eyes - the stone was melting away and coloring in skin, and hair, and clothes - shimmering wings that glowed like transparent rainbow, all of the fairy, the basin, the pool, seemed to be alive with warmth and color - all but the fairy’s toes, still concrete and stuck to the stone circle beneath them.

Walther looked up, again into the fairy’s still-black eyes. He saw the face and lips moving this time, the smirk now very much alive. “Your tail”, the living fairy said, gently.

Walther raised his eyebrows, glanced back and saw the tip of his long pink tail still touching the snowy ground from which he had stepped up only minutes (that felt like months) earlier.

“You’ll have to let go, you won’t be able to find until you do”, the fairy said simply, seeing into Walther’s heart.

The cautious possum choked back his every natural instinct to turn, to run, to flee, to faint, to….

He closed his eyes, and lifted his tail off the earth.

---------------------------------------------------------------------

A brief excerpt from a tragically unfinished short story about a very anxious little opossum trying to find his brother.

Inspired by a lovely photo that I'd be delighted to know the original artist of, but in the meantime, found on @the-possum-posting here

[coolbugs]

Bug of the Day

New hungry friend wants all the shrub honeysuckle!

(snowberry clearwing caterpillar, Hemaris diffinis)

[afigment]

Snowberry clearwing moth :)

[onenicebugperday]

@hyperionsceo​ submitted: Howdy! My mom took this photo, so, I apologize if it isn't very clear for ID'ing purposes.

She and my dad saw this bug (on the flower in the bottom) in New Hampshire, but my dad is also confident he's seen this type of critter in Maine as well!

Any guesses on what it could be would be very appreciated ^_^ (also included a zoomed in version of the photo that was brighted a bit)

Hi! It’s a clearwing sphinx moth in the genus Hemaris, but I’d need a clearer photo to tell you for sure which one it is. It’s most likely either a hummingbird clearwing or a snowberry clearwing. The former is more red than the latter, but the latter’s wings can look reddish in certain light, so hard to say from these photos for sure! If I could see the legs I’d be able to tell you definitively. There are also two other moths in the same genus found in New Hampshire, so it potentially could be those, but the’yre much less common.

[ainawgsd]

Hemaris diffinis, the snowberry clearwing, is a moth of the order Lepidoptera, family Sphingidae. This moth is sometimes called "hummingbird moth" or "flying lobster".  These nicknames are derived from its supposed physical resemblance to other (genetically unrelated) animals.

It is about 32–51 millimetres (1.25–2 in). The moth's abdomen has yellow and black segments much like those of the bumblebee, for whom it might be mistaken due to its color and flight pattern similarities. The moth's wings lack the large amount of scales found in most other lepidopterans, particularly in the centralized regions, making them appear clear. It loses the scales on its wings early after the pupa stage by its highly active flight tendencies. It flies during the daylight much like the other hummingbird moths, but it may also continue flight into the evening, particularly if it has found a good source of nectar. The larvae feed on plants including honeysuckle, viburnum, hawthorn, snowberry, cherry, mint, and plum.

The moth is found from the Northwest Territories, British Columbia, southern Ontario, eastern Manitoba, and in western Quebec in Canada. In the United States this species has been located in southern California and Baja California Norte, Illinois, east through most of the United States from Maine to West Virginia to Florida.

[gluom]

saw a bee shaped like a lobster but i went on whatsthatbug.com and found out: its a snowberry clear wing

[ainawgsd]

Hemaris thysbe, the hummingbird clearwing, is a moth of the family Sphingidae (hawkmoths). Beating its wings rapidly, H. thysbe hovers to collect nectar from a variety of flowers. The combination of its appearance and its behavior commonly leads to it being confused with a hummingbird or bumblebee. Hemaris thysbe is found in a large portion of North America, with a range extending from Alaska to Oregon in the west and from Newfoundland to Florida in the east. It is a migratory species and is most common in southern Ontario and the eastern United States. As a caterpillar, it feeds on honeysuckle, dogbane, and several types of fruit trees.

Coloration varies between individuals, but typically the moth is olive green and burgundy on its back, and white or yellow and burgundy on the underside. When it first hatches, the wings of H. thysbe are dark red to black. As it begins to fly, scales fall off leaving a mostly clear wing with reddish-brown borders and veins. It has light-colored, often yellow, legs and a lack of striping on the underside which distinguishes this moth from other Hemaris species. The antennae of H. thysbe are thicker at their base and are curved at the ends. Unlike most moths, the species lacks hearing organs. 

Adults are most active during the hottest parts of the day, but remain active until sunset. H. thysbecollects nectar from a wide variety of flowers using a long (19–21 millimetres [0.75–0.83 in]) proboscis while hovering above the bloom. It shows a preference for pink and purple flowers, moving rapidly from one flower to the next. The moth is considered to be a hummingbird mimic and is frequently mistaken for the bird or for a bumblebee.

As a caterpillar, H. thysbe feeds on cherry trees, European cranberry bush, hawthorns, dogbane, honeysuckle, and snowberry. It burrows into the soil to overwinter as a brown, hard-shelled pupa. In the late spring, it emerges as an adult moth. H. thysbe lays green eggs on the underside of plant leaves, which hatch in about a week. Development takes four weeks, after which the caterpillar spins a cocoon at ground level. Two to four weeks later a moth emerges for a second breeding cycle before summer's end in southern climates. In northern climates, H. thysbe has a single mating cycle per year.

Hemaris thysbe lives in second-growth forest, in meadows, and is commonly found in cultivated gardens of suburbia. H. thysbe is a migratory species, capable of traveling long distances. In single brood regions, adults are found throughout the summer. In the south, adults are present from March to June and from August to October. It has minimal economic impact to humans, acting neither as a crop pollinator nor as a pest. The moth does, however, pollinate several cultivated flowers, and is the primary pollinator for some species of orchid. H. thysbe is not endangered or threatened.