Jar of Goodness 1.16.22: The Eggplant Leafrollers

This is my second installment of this, my online, blog-based, virtual “gratitude jar,” inspired by the tradition my brother and his family have been enjoying for years. A simple, weekly recording of something you’re grateful for. A.k.a., a “jar of goodness.” (They even seem to have a little theme song for it.)

So here’s this week’s thing I’m grateful for:

Our visitation this winter by eggplant leafrollers (Lineodes integra). What nifty insects! What a strange little appearance of nature, in the dead of winter.

(Explanation below the picture.)

This was on December 31. I only saw one at first—it was perched in our first-floor bathroom window. I was sure (well, pretty sure) it was a moth, but I couldn’t get it narrowed down to family, much less genus or species. I suspected it was in one of the crambid or pyralid groups, which are both huge families with hundreds of species. I didn’t have the time to march through all the genera on Bugguide, and I’m annoyed by the idea of photo-based digital ID apps, but fortunately someone on an regional insect group got it to genus for me. Hooray!

As caterpillars, eggplant leafrollers eat the leaves of tomato, eggplant, and other members of the nightshade family (yeah, toxic leaves). They roll the leaves, creating a little shelter for themselves while they chew. Aha!

Sue’s reaction was, “NOW I know what’s been eating the Jerusalem cherry plant!” (We have a big, nice potted Solanum pseudocapsicum plant that Sue got as a start from her parents way back when. It has beautifully dark blue-green leaves, bright orange, cherry-size fruits, and a lush, shrubby habit. It comes inside every winter to survive.)

As adults, eggplant leafrollers have a really snazzy pattern on their wings, with a big, uninterrupted brown swoosh running along the forewing. I keep thinking it looks like a brocade or a paisley. They perch at a 45-degree angle to whatever they’re standing on, like they’re doing a pushup, hold their narrow wings out in a V shape, and have the habit of curling their abdomen up into a C shape. The abdomen tip sometimes almost touches the head, making them look like a ring.

So it started with the one eggplant leafroller bopping around in our bathroom, perching on the window, the walls, the towels. Then, in the following week or so, I realized there were about five others on the first floor, in the room with the Jerusalem cherry. Perching on the walls, looking out the windows, standing on the drapes.

For the past few weeks, I’ve had compassion for them, since they’re screwed by Missouri weather and our bringing them indoors. Instead of hibernating, they pupated and emerged, their bodies expecting balmy weather, and now they have nowhere to go. Our house in winter is dreadfully dry. Showering, I would shut the door so steam would build up on the walls; maybe the moth in the bathroom, at least, would get some moisture that way. It always fluttered off when I tried putting water on whatever it was sitting on. Silly thing.

I haven’t seen any of them for a while now, so I guess they’re all kaput, dried up, lying crumpled in the corners of the room, waiting for the vacuum to erase them from all recognizable existence.

Now that they're gone, I kind of miss them.

Anyway, I’m grateful to get to learn about these little fellow earthlings, and the opportunity to show them some charity in the form of moisture and appreciation. I’ll have to look for their compatriots out in the wild next summer.

The Moths of 2019

Going through my pictures from La Plata, I fell in love again with an insect we saw there, a dogbane beetle. It was resting on a shaded, north-facing window, but it was shining beautifully in rich rainbow colors. And I realized, “Hey, I’ve met a lot of new insects this year.” Maybe you’d like to meet them too?

Although I’ve taken loads of “bug pictures” this year (I'm still taking plenty more), I’m only going to do the highlights. But because there are so many, I’ll present them in five separate posts: moths, beetles, true bugs, and a collection of flies, mantids, and others as a sort of “miscellaneous insects” category. I’ll finish with spiders and other noninsects. Ready? Let’s go!





This here is a boxwood leaftier (Galasa nigrinodis)—a type of pyralid moth—that was perched on the bathroom wall one morning in mid-April. It seemed very early in the year to be seeing a moth; Bugguide says they usually fly June through September. I’m pretty sure it must’ve come indoors as a pupa on a potted plant we brought inside for the winter. We have a box bush in the backyard, which must have provided its food last year before it pupated accidentally in some plant we ended up bringing inside. Isn’t it fascinating how they stand, like they’re doing a pushup? I was impressed by the beauty of its maroon and orange iridescence.

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The next two are geometrid moths—the name means “earth measurer” and it refers to the caterpillars, which most people would call “inchworms.” As adults, they’re distinctive moths, typically posing with wings open and flattened out to the sides. The colors and patterns on fore wings and hind wings usually run seamlessly onto one another. If you’re thinking of learning more about moths, geometrids are a good place to start—because many of them are so pretty.



The first day of June, this geometrid, called the bent-line carpet (Costaconvexa centrostrigaria), was perched on our front doorsteps. Wow! It pays to look closely at insects, doesn’t it! It’s called a “carpet,” apparently, because the ornate patterns make it look like an oriental rug. As a caterpillar, this moth eats various species of knotweeds and smartweeds. I predict this species will be extra common in our area, given the flooding this year—we have a bumper crop of smartweeds locally, about everywhere the floodwaters had been a few months ago.



A few nights later (June 3), a juniper-twig geometer (Patalene olyzonaria) came to our front porch light. As the name suggests, the caterpillars of this species eat juniper foliage. The caterpillar, true to the typical geometrid pattern, looks JUST like a juniper twig—tan, with a series of little X markings—and when it stiffens and stands still at an angle to the twig it’s resting on, you’d have little luck seeing it. I truly admire how the adult moth looks like a dead leaf, right down to the kind of wavy texture to the wings. I'm grateful this insect let me photograph it.

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I know you’ve seen plume moths before—probably on a screen window or the side of your house in the morning. You’ve probably wondered what they are. They always hold their wings folded tight and out to the side, so they look like a T. It’s easy to recognize them as plume moths (family), but narrowing them to species is much more tricky.

I’m confident that this species is the morning-glory plume moth (Emmelina monodactyla). First, it’s a common and widespread plume moth species. Second, its caterpillars eat plants in the morning glory family, including field bindweed, a plant we struggle with in (so far, only in) one sector of our yard. Also, it superficially matches the pictures in Bugguide. (Bugguide, my guide!)

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On August 3, we enjoyed a few hours hanging out at Hermann’s Stone Hill Winery. We were getting ready to leave, and we saw this moth flying around; it finally lit in an oak tree near the parking lot. It’s not a great picture, because I was holding the camera way up above my head and zooming . . . and hoping for something decent. This is an imperial moth (Eacles imperialis), one of the lovely, majestic giant silkworm (or royal) moths. Others in the same group are luna moths, Polyphemus and cecropia moths, royal walnut moth, rosy maple moth, etc. Big, furry, gorgeous animals.

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Working on field guide entries about moths and insects recently has taught me a lot about creatures almost no one would give a second thought to. And guess what: learning just a little about them makes them incredibly fascinating. This species is in the crambid snout moth family (used to be grouped with the pyralids, like the boxwood leaftier above). Both have mouthparts that tend to be pointed forward, making it look like they have snouts.

Most crambids are tiny and not colorful. Many curl their wings around the body, so they look like little sticks. Sod webworms are a classic example. Even though they’re not colorful, you still have to look at wing patterns to identify them. This species, the elegant grass-veneer (Microcrambus elegans) has a pattern that looks like a frowny Halloween mask! So it’s rather easy to ID, even from a distance. This moth has has a wingspan of only about ½ inch. The larvae feed on grasses. You almost certainly have some of these trapped in your lamp covers, inside or out. (One of my insect superheroes, Eric Eaton, addressed indoor bug safaris in a recent wintertime blog post. I love it!!!!)

Hashtag "I love insects." Hashtag "I wish other people could see how beautiful and interesting they are."

Next, I'll share some nifty beetles!

Two New Friends I’d Like You to Meet

Hi there! Sorry for the absence, but you know how it is—summer—gotta live it up while you can. We recently took a trip to Ohio, and before that was preparation, and after that was dealing with all the stuff that had piled up. You know.

Meanwhile, I’ve been working on another lengthy post. (BAD blogger! BAD! I should know by now that “no one reads long posts” and that I’m just wasting my time. At the very least, I should break it down into smaller chunks. Right? Because everyone’s got ADD these days. Right?)

Well, anyway. Sometimes you do things just for yourself.

Today, I have a few new friends to introduce to you. I suspect both fall into the category of “I’ve seen them, but we’ve never been formally introduced.”

New Friend Number 1

First, I’d like you to meet a little fly (a dipteran—a two-winged insect) that has been unusually prevalent in our yard this year.

The name is “picture-winged fly”; it’s called that because of the little black, orange, and white triangles and dots that appear on the wings. Delphinia picta is the proper name. My photos are only so-so; you can see better ones here at BugGuide.

Viewed from above, they’re rather triangular. They have a habit of moving their wings in a circular motion while they’re walking around—like they’re rowing a boat.




If you’ve seen them before, you probably haven’t paid much attention to them, because they don’t bite or sting, they don’t fly in your face, they don’t enter your house.




The m.o. of the picture-winged fly, as far as I can tell, is that they love compost and other decaying things. As larvae, that’s their home and their food. (They’re kind of like fruit flies, in this respect.) I think that’s why we’ve been seeing them a lot this year: They’re especially prevalent around our compost bin!

Well, they can have that rotting ol’ leaf stuff: “Knock yourselves out, little dudes.”




By the way, I think that’s a gas mask they’re wearing!


New Friend Number 2

This one has a rather strange story. First of all, rest assured that this little insect (no more than 3/4 of an inch long) is indeed a moth. A moth with narrow wings that fold straight down its back.




Unlike a lot of moths, this one has pretty colors and is active during the daytime.

The name is ailanthus webworm moth, or Atteva aurea. (In this case, the scientific name is easier to learn and say than the common name!) Here it is at BugGuide.

Does the name “ailanthus” ring a bell? Well, Ailanthus is the genus name of the tree-of-heaven, an oft-planted (and oftener-escaped) tree originally from China. Like geraniums, begonias, and forsythias, ailanthus’s genus name has become its common name as well.

So Ailanthus altissima, the so-called tree of heaven, is as hardy as all get-out. Tough as nails! (One reason they were planted in urban areas is that they can survive in rough neighborhoods! One of their common names is “ghetto palm”; another is “tree from hell”!) They’re an invasive exotic pest tree that easily out-competes our native trees—they’re bad news, and in North America they deserve extermination much, much more than, say, rattlesnakes and copperheads, who belong here.

The ailanthus webworm moth uses ailanthus as a host tree—lays its eggs on it, and the larvae (little silk-spinning caterpillars) gobble up the leaves.




So now you’re wondering if the ailanthus moth didn’t also come from China—perhaps as an experiment in biological control. But no! They are a native North American moth whose original favorite host trees are the tropical paradise trees (genus Simarouba).

Ailanthus webworm moths are originally native to the tropical Americas, where paradise trees grow, but now that they’ve found ailanthus trees to be delicious, too, they migrate north each spring—even into Canada—to take advantage of all the free food. (Unfortunately, they don’t seem to do much harm to the evil, invasive ailanthus trees. Poo!)

Apparently the ailanthus webworm moths cannot survive freezing winters, so you have to wonder what the point is to them breeding and laying eggs on ailanthus trees this far out of their survival range. It sounds like any eggs, larvae, pupae, or adults caught here in December would expire the way an orange tree would.

Hmm. Maybe the moth’s lifestyle is just as messed up by the presence of the invasive tree as all the trees and other interconnected, native organisms being displaced by it.

So the next time you see one of these pretty little ailanthus moths, think of its unknowing sacrifice up here in the cold northlands, and thank it for doing its best to help cramp the style of those invasive trees.

Virginia Creeper Sphinx Moth

Well, we were just heading out the door last night to get dinner someplace (I was too exhausted to cook—more on that in a second) when we noticed this groovy moth on the brickwork by our front steps.

We’re now in the habit of grabbing our cameras anytime we some something interesting, so instead of reaching for the field guides, we took pictures.

Indeed—later on, I didn’t identify it with a field guide at all (heresy for an editor of field guidebooks), but instead looked it up online at the wonderful and fun arthropod ID site “What’s That Bug.”

It was obviously some kind of sphinx moth or hawkmoth. The family is the Sphingidae (SFIN-jih-dee), which also includes the obnoxious tomato hornworm, the fairylike hummingbird moths, and this little fellow I showed you last year.

The larvae of the sphinx moths are typically (maybe all?) “hornworms”—the caterpillars have an “anal horn,” an elongated, sometimes thornlike projection arising from their butt like a tail.




So, this little fella is Darapsa myron, which, according to this informative Web site, is pronounced “dagh-RAP-suh MY-ron.” (I wonder what the “g” is for in that—how about “dah-RHAP-suh”? Whatever.)

It’s commonly called the Virginia Creeper Sphinx, a.k.a. Grapevine Sphinx, a.k.a. Hog Sphinx. The first two common names make a great deal of sense, because the larvae of this species munch on the foliage of Virginia creeper and grapes (in the genus Vitis), plus Amelopsis and Viburnum species (think of peppervine and raccoon grapes for the former, and blackhaws for the latter, here in Missouri).




I have no idea where the name “Hog Sphinx” came from. Combining the porcine with the Egyptian in a name for a moth seems completely bizarre.




Anyway, here’s more info for you. Once the larvae grow to full size on their Virginia creeper or grape vines, they descend to the leaf litter below to spin their cocoons and pupate. When they emerge as metamorphosed, winged adults, their diet switches to the sweet nectar of flowers.




Apparently you can often find them drinking from flowers, and they’re also attracted to sugar water.

I’m not sure if this is a boy or a girl, but I think it’s a boy—though its antennae aren’t massively feathery, some other pictures I saw online of this species seemed to have even smaller antennae, so I guess those were the females. (As with other moths, the female emits pheromones that males detect with their big feathery antennae.) [APPARENTLY A FEMALE; SEE COMMENTS BELOW.]




I think the curious little “crook” or bend in the antennae is interesting—apparently all Virginia Creeper Sphinxes have that. It almost gives them an “expression,” like a cocked eyebrow, I think.

Where do you find these moths? In the United States, they cover the entire eastern part of the country and extend as far west as the Dakotas, Nebraska, and New Mexico. (I’m kind of surprised they haven’t taken up residence in Northern California, what with all the vineyards there. Wouldn’t that climate support them? I suppose their introduction to that new territory is probably just a few accidental shipments away. None of what I read said they were a serious pest on vineyards, but I can’t imagine they’d be welcome by anyone wanting to grow grapes.)




Meanwhile, there are plenty of weedy wild grape vines and Virginia creepers around here for them to feed on, and they can be my guest! Indeed, it is ironic that we spotted this moth the same day I had spent part of the hot afternoon trimming, yanking, and wrestling various weedy vines from our poor lilac trees—Japanese honeysuckle, English ivy, and that horrible, immortal, exotic clematis. The effort was tough and disheartening—our poor lilacs!—and it had exhausted me. While I worked, I decided I “hate” every single vine in the universe.

But within a few hours, I was kneeling on our front steps, taking pictures of this lovely fuzzy olive-tan creature that depends on vines for its sustenance. So, okay. Maybe I don’t hate all vines . . . just that doggone invasive Japanese honeysuckle!




Insect life cycles always stir my imagination. These creatures begin life as juicy green, creeping worms, and then become these gloriously patterned, furrily scaled adults, that can fly! And yet other insects, the ants, go the opposite direction—once pupated from grub stage, queen ants begin adult life as creatures with the capacity of flight, but after mating they tear off their own wings, burrow into the earth, and live the rest of their lives in a hole in the dirt.

Both life cycles are equally impressive, in my view. Sometimes I think the best part of living on this Earth is getting to witness so many variations on the theme of life.

Yellow-Collared Scape Moth

I took this picture yesterday (July 3): It's a yellow-collared scape moth, Cisseps fulvicollis.

Yes, I finally looked up this little sucker. I've seen them, known them, since I was a little kid. They always looked like weird fireflies to me, with the orange "shoulders" and the black body. I never thought too much about them.

We have a ton of blue ageratums that come up every year--apparently it's one of the scape moth's favorite food plants.

And it turns out "lightning bug" is the correct "idea," as these moths (yes, completely harmless moths, which unfurl proboscises and sip nectar from flowers) are Batesian mimics for distasteful beetles, such as lightning bugs, which carry toxic and nasty-tasting compounds called lucibufagins.

And they also supposedly mimic wasps, too, which can sting. Thus they're double-Batesian mimics, right?

(I think they look more like lightning bugs, don't you?)

Oh, by the way, by the looks of the antennae, this one would be a male: On our air conditioner, catching the good vibes.

Lettered Sphinx Moth

This moth was standing on the screen of the bathroom window on Monday morning, the eleventh.

Because I’m not very good about identifying the basic brown moths (all I knew was that this was some kind of sphinx), I made a point of looking it up. “What’s That Bug” to the rescue! Here is their page for sphinx moths.

Another Web site that was helpful is this one.

So what we have here is a lettered sphinx moth, Deidamia inscriptum.

Other well-known members of the sphinx moth family (the Sphingidae) include hummingbird and clearwing moths (which look like a cross between a hummingbird and a bumble bee), tomato hornworms (most sphinx moth larvae have a horn on their tails), and many others. They are often remarkably large, and many have glorious colors, eyespots on their hind wings, and so on. Some of the darker species look like B-2 bombers when they’re at rest. Really cool.

Anyway, this little feller is one of the more drab types, though this species does have the distinction of being one of the earliest sphinx moths to emerge in springtime.

Adults like to feed from lilac and phlox flowers, apparently, and the larvae like to chew up leaves of grape and Virginia creeper, as well as members of the genus Ampelopsis (more vines: possum grape, porcelain berry, peppervine, etc.; some of these plants are invasive exotics).

Lettered sphinx moths are found in the eastern half of our country, more or less.

From the same Web site cited above: “Females call at night, and males fly into the wind to pick up and track the pheromone plume. The species is also active during the day.”

Males, such as this one, commonly rest with the abdomen strongly curved. Probably showing off their “junk,” huh?

Or . . . just happy to be alive—in between the severe thunderstorms, we’ve been having some really nice weather this spring.