Here's my last moth for National Moth Week:
Yep, it's really a moth. This one is trying to look like a paper wasp, but the "fluffy," scaly body and thick, feathery antennae reveal its true nature. A real paper wasp has shiny integument and thin antennae.
I don't have much to say about the identification of this one. That's because I haven't been able to figure out what it is! You would think that a moth this distinctive would be easy to identify, but there is actually a whole "tribe" (a tribe sits somewhere between Family and Genus) of wasps that look similar to this, all of which belong to the Family Sesidae, a group filled with wasp-like moths.
On Bugguide, I was able to find at least three moths in our area that could be a match: Paranthrene asilipennis, Paranthrene dollii, and Vitacea polistiformis. To me, all of these look very similar, and I think it takes a real expert in this group to tell the difference. I'll probably never learn what it is, unless one of those experts takes a look at this blog.
So my week with moths comes to an end. I am still not a moth expert. If anything, I have learned that the world of moth diversity is even more complex than I thought. But you can't learn about every moth at once. This week, I learned a little bit about five of them. Only about 125,000 to go!
If you can upload these moth pictures to www.projectnoah.org, there will be some moth specialists who are eager to identify it.
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