Happy little moths

A few weeks ago, I stumbled upon some of the coolest animals I've ever seen. Hanging off of the butterfly bush in front of my house was the following scene:

I found myself wondering what on Earth these things are and what they were doing. Rather than actually tell you up front, let's go through a little thought exercise. What was amazing about this incident is that the two insects didn't move the whole time. At all. I got pretty close to take these pictures and even used the flash, but nothing startled them. Thus, I was able to examine them very well by sight. So let's get to it:

1) What Phylum/Class are they? It's pretty obvious to me. They have six legs, two pairs of wings, and segmented bodies. That means they are members of class Insecta, the insects.

2) What order of Insecta are they? The two pairs of wings rule out several orders, including Diptera (flies). The hind and forewings overlap and are of strikingly different sizes, ruling out a bunch more, such as Odonota (dragonflies and damseflies), Plecoptera (stoneflies), Neuroptera (lacewings), Trichoptera (caddisflies), etc. They're also really fuzzy, which doesn't happen in too many orders in North America. At this point, I've narrowed it down to Hymenoptera (wasps, bees, and ants) and Lepidoptera (butterflies and moths).

3) It's all in the wings. After reading my last line and seeing the above picture, you may have thought "What kind of a butterfly or moth has clear wings? It must be a Hymenopteran." Sure, you've probably never seen a butterfly with clear wings. However, have you ever seen a wasp with a big fat body and small eyes? I think not. Upon closer examination (a decent picture of which requires a microscope or very specialized camera), I discovered that the darker portions of the wings are covered with scales. Hymenopterans do not have scales, so it must be a Lepidopteran.

4) It's a moth. Butterfly antennae have little knobs at the end. Contrary to popular belief, some moths are indeed active during the day.

4) But wait, there's more! I thought it would be impossible to identify these further without a magnifying glass. I forgot that I had my insect book inside, so I ended up cheating a bit. I went online, looked up moths with clear wings in Virginia, and found the answer almost instantly: genus Hemaris, the clearwings.

As for the behavior, it's probably some sort of mating. Yes, moths have sex. I can't exactly prove it (I didn't feel like picking one up and poking around inside it), but I don't know of anything else that would keep two insects in that position and not allow them to get bothered. I've seen similar situations with cicadas and grasshoppers that barely move if they are disturbed while mating.

On a side note, I've been getting back into Photoshop a little more. I dropped it for a while after visiting my sister's art show last year and realizing how easy it is to over-edit everything. However, in this situation, a bit of editing is necessary to accurately portray the subject. The lighting was funky, with shots from the front of the moths appearing too bright with flash or too dark without it. So, I took the following shot...

... and did some cropping and color saturation.

I also found it impossible to get a good shot from head-on. The picture below is probably the best I took, and still turned turned out pretty badly.

So, I utilized the over-used "Shadows and Highlighting" tool to bring out some features of the moths.

You can see how tiny its eyes are (just under the antennae), and there even appears to be some of its probscis visible. This pretty much confirms that it's not a wasp; I can't imagine a wasp head looking anything like that.

I hope you enjoyed this post. Maybe it'll get you to look at insects a bit differently, and not just as brown things buzzing around lamps. Thanks for reading!