National Moth Week celebrates beauty, life cycles
Keep your porch lights burning! National Moth Week is July 21-29, and it promises to be a fluttering good time.
This unusual celebration had its start in East Brunswick, New Jersey, a wildlife-friendly town that manages its own 11-acre butterfly park and shuts down a stretch of road each year for the spotted salamander migration. East Brunswick is also home to the Friends of the East Brunswick Environmental Commission, a nonprofit organization consisting of scientists and wildlife enthusiasts dedicated to teaching community members about nature.
Two members from Rutgers University — David Moskowitz, a wildlife studies specialist, and Liti Haramaty, a researcher at the Institute of Marine and Coastal Science — began hosting local moth nights at the butterfly park in 2006.
“We were astonished at the first moth night, how successful it was,” Moskowitz said. A generator powered a special light used to attract the moths, which landed for viewing on a bedsheet tied between two trees.
“People who had never experienced moths before were wowed,” he added.
MOTH WEEK BEGINNINGS
Those moth nights evolved into National Moth Week, which is meant to raise awareness about the underappreciated cousins of the butterfly. Scientists don’t know as much about the natural history, distribution and species of moths. That’s where citizen scientists like you can help. Anyone with a porch light and a camera can participate and submit what they see to one of the many online biological data depositories with which FEBEC has partnered to collect moth information.
“Every data point, every observation can be very important,” Haramaty said.
The first National Moth Week was held July 23-29, 2012, with 307 registered locations in 49 states and 29 other countries. Participants ranged from individuals and families looking for moths in their own backyards or local parks to conservation organizations and state agencies holding well-advertised public events. Moth Week is now held annually during the last full week of July.
DIVERSE AND FASCINATING
Most people are wellacquainted with some of North America’s 1,000 or so known species of butterflies. But far fewer have any great knowledge of moths, despite the fact that more than 10 times as many species of moths — approximately 11,000 — reside on our continent. Arkansas is believed to be home to 2,500 to 3,000 moth species, but there could be many more.
“The number of different moths that occur in Arkansas may reach into the thousands, but little has been published or even known about them,” said Eric Lovely, director of the Arkansas Lepidoptera Survey, a program designed to learn more about these Natural State insects.
New species of moths are still being discovered, even here in Arkansas. In 2016, for example, Donald Davis and Gary Graves with the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History published about their research and discovery of a previously unknown species of moth found while studying the American smoke tree, a relative of sumac, growing in the Arkansas Ozarks. The moth’s caterpillars eat the trees’ leaves. So far, the new moth species, named Cameraria cotinivora, has only been found in three counties in north-central Arkansas and one county in south-central Missouri.
What we do know about Arkansas moths indicates that they are among the most amazingly diverse group of animals found in our state, ranging from as small as a pencil tip to as large as an adult human’s hand. Their colors and patterns can be dazzling or dull.
Many species are drab brown or gray bugs you might see clinging to trees or flying beneath street lights at night. But if you’re lucky, you might observe one of those big beautiful celebrities of the moth world like the light-green luna moth with long “tails” on its delicate wings, or the Polyphemus moth, which has bold “eye” patches on its underwings that discourage other animals from eating it.
Some moths impersonate other animals to avoid being eaten, having evolved to look like less palatable critters such as wasps and even tarantulas. One Arkansas moth, called the beautiful wood-nymph, is anything but beautiful. It hides in plain sight by mimicking bird droppings!
The caterpillars of moths are interesting, too. Some we dislike because of their harmful nature, like the tomato hornworm and the corn earworm, which eat our garden crops; the greater wax moth, whose caterpillars wreak havoc by eating the wax in bees’ honeycombs; and the caterpillars of the buck moth, io moth and others that can deliver nasty stings with their venomous spines or hairs. But most caterpillars are quite interesting, like the ferocious-looking but harmless hickory horned devil, the caterpillar of the regal moth, that grows as big as a cigar and, of course, the fuzzy little woolly bear, a tiger-moth caterpillar, which some people believe can forecast the coming winter weather.
While the caterpillars of some moths are serious agricultural pests, most moths offer a huge array of ecological benefits. Many are important pollinators. Their hairy bodies pick up pollen from any flower they land on. Others serve as food for birds, bats, fish and other creatures.
ATTRACTING MOTHS FOR VIEWING
If all these facts have convinced you that moths are pretty cool insects, you might be interested in attracting moths so you can see them for yourself. Enthusiasts use a few tricks to lure moths closer.
The porch-light method is the easiest. Just leave the porch light on for a while and see what flies up. Among the theories about why moths are attracted to light is the notion that moths are actually trapped by light, like sensory overload.
This method works even better if you replace the regular light bulb in your porch light with a black light bulb. You also can rig an incandescent black light unit on your porch, or, with an extension cord, out in the yard a bit. It helps to aim the black light at a white sheet hung on a clothesline or between two poles. The sheet gives the moths a place to rest and be observed.
Some moths won’t fly to lights but are attracted by the smell of a special dinner you and your kids can create by mixing together some mashed ripe bananas, beer and brown sugar. Ideally, you want to let this mix ferment for a few days. Then, using a stiff paint brush, paint a patch of the mixture on the bark of trees at the edge of your yard or an open field. After nightfall, visit the trees you painted and see what types of moths were attracted. A flashlight softened with red cellophane across the lens is less likely to disturb the moths than a regular light, but you’ll still have to walk and talk quietly to avoid scaring the moths away.
The fun part is identifying those moths that you’ve attracted. A great resource for that is the Peterson Field Guide to Moths of Southeastern North America. This book is a superb tool that amateur moth-watchers can use to identify 1,800 common species.
If you plan your moth outing during National Moth Week, by all means share the things you’ve discovered here in Arkansas with other moth watchers around the world. Learn more at