Sunday 28 April 2013

Zebronia phenice (Cramer 1780)

If you've been paying attention, you may have noticed that thus far, we've missed a rather massive insect order. It's not as big as the beetles, or the flies (both, at the time of writing, represented by one species each on this blog...), but it's around the same size as the wasps (including bees), and much bigger than the bugs...


I'll give you a taxonomically ordered string of hints: 

Eukaryota
  Animalia
    Eumetazoa
      Bilateralia
        Nephrozoa
          Protostomia
            Ecdysozoa
              Arthropoda
                Hexapoda
                  Insecta
                    Dicondylia
                      Pterygota
                        Manopterygota
                          Neoptera
                            Eumetabola
                              Endopterygota
                                Panorpida
                                  Amphiesmenoptera
                                    Lepidoptera
Have you got it yet? Extra hint - in Greek, Lepidos (Λεπίδως) means scaly, Ptera (φτερό) means wing... Scaly wing...

No?

The Lepidoptera are the moths (including butterflies). Just so that you're aware, Lepidopterists (people who study moths, partially for money but mostly because they just like them) are a little bit like ornithologists in terms of taxonomy, in that they've got such a rich and varied history of being wrong that they have a lot of trouble sorting out quite where everything belongs, and so finding out precisely where various moths belong in relationship to one another is more than a bit iffy.

So, as we continue onwards, bear in mind that the phylogeny here is largely subjective.
                                       Glossata
                                         Neolepidoptera
                                           Heteroneura
                                             Ditrysia
                                               Tineina
                                                 Tineina (unranked clades don't always follow naming patterns like the rest of taxonomy does, which is why we there's a clade here with its parent's name)
                                                   Pyraloidea (an awful lot of the so-called 'Micromoths' belong to this superfamily, including:
                                                     Crambidae (snout moths)
                                                       Spilomelinae (Pearls. The moths, not the nacreous result of an irritated bivalve...)

Zebronia phenice
(Cramer, 1780)
                                                       
As you may guess from the Generic name (Zebronia), this one's a bit stripy...
Zebronia phenice (Cramer 1780), Chongwe, Lusaka, Zambia, February 2013


This is a fairly average-sized moth, probably a little under an inch across its wings, and because of its habit of landing upside down beneath leaves that are larger than it, it really shouldn't be very conspicious. However, it is at least partially active during the day, and it's very difficult not to be noticed fluttering around when you look like this: 



As you may imagine, its common name also refers to its stripes - Zebra Pearl Moth, or Zebra pyrale, or, probably most widely used, just plain old Zebra Moth


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