המועדפים של vrgssmncht

You know you’ve found a large moth when…

1. After a 40 year career as a wildlife biologist, you can’t believe what you’re seeing is real.
2. Your ruler isn’t long enough to get a good measurement (2nd image), so you go back to get a longer ruler (3rd image) and that isn’t long enough, so you scramble around to find a carpenter’s measuring tape to fully span the wings (4th image).
3. Your astonishment is like the joy of a child on Christmas morning; you start laughing and giggling uncontrollably.
4. The largest moth on your sheet has a wingspan 40X the size of the smallest one.
5. You stay up until 3:30 a.m. journaling about one moth.
6. You start taking selfies...with a moth (last image).

To the best of my ability to measure this critter, the wingspan (with a bit of the tip of the right FW missing) is about 27.8 cm, so it would probably be about 28.5 cm (11.2 in) if it were intact. The species is said to have the largest wingspan of any Lepidopteran in the world.

The moth was initially discovered on the sheet by Mary Kay Sexton. I had overlooked it.

To read more of the story, see:
https://www.inaturalist.org/journal/gcwarbler/13211-mothing-in-panama

[See also: https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/218581553]

Found this guy floating upside down on surface next to piling of MBL dock. First for this location in a long time. Pretty cool. Records from late 1800s had this species in the Mill Pond that is connected to Eel Pond now by a culvert. Usually we go to Menemsha on the Vineyard for this species. Was cool to find in Eel Pond. Maybe it was flushed from Mill Pond. I took a net and did some scrapes on the piling and floats but it could easily have drifted over. Wind was SW but it does tend to swirl around the pond a bit. Vaucheria, (its food plant) is found on the bottom.

Photo license and credit belong to the Florida Museum of Natural History (FLMNH), the Hakai Institute, and MarineGEO | http://specifyportal.flmnh.ufl.edu/iz/ | Field Number: BHAK-10137 | This observation is a part of the collaborative work between FLMNH, the Smithsonian Institution's Marine Global Earth Observatory (MarineGEO) and Tennenbaum Marine Observatories Network, the Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History, and the Hakai Institute