Earlier today we spotted a large moth at our back door. After taking many pictures and looking through them, we identified it as a Polyphemus moth.  These are in the Giant Silkworm Moth family and are also known as Antheraea Polyphemus.

He barely moved around while I was taking pictures, even with the flash.  Using a macro, I was easily under an inch away at times.  It's hours later and he's still there, too.

The slideshow here is from my Picasa account, but the Flickr image set can be found here. I wish Flickr could do the same sort of thing so easily without any additional tools.  Oh well, this works well enough.  He was too boring to take video of and he didn't even open up his wings.

The other night, up in our top-floor office, we had one of these flapping around in a window. At first we thought it was a bat because of the size, but we quickly realized it wasn't.  It, or one like it, visited us on subsequent nights, too.

I looked up what moths eat because I was hoping maybe big moths would eat things like mosquitos. Sadly, it doesn't work that way.  If anything, they absorb moisture through their long tongues.  Many adult moths don't eat at all and some don't even have mouths.  I guess that means they aren't terribly long lived in their adult form. As a caterpillar, though, it can apparently eat 86,000 times its weight in just two months.  Too many of these can strip a tree naked.

Still, it's neat.  It's also so amazingly furry that I kept wanting to just try to pet it. I didn't. I was worried about hurting it or simply scaring it away. Trying to pet it without touching it's wings would be pretty hard. Speaking of wings, you can see in one of the images just how furry it's wings are, too.

Anyway, enjoy the pictures. :)

Update:  These moths natively exist across all of the US and Canada except Alaska, Hawaii, Arizona, Nevada, and Newfoundland.  This particular moth is male because of it's large antennae.  They're used to detect female pheramones. This site has much more information.

Posted by Shane on June 25, 2008 12:57 PM | Permalink