2017 October 3

 

  Sorry – No October 2 posting.

 

Jochen Moehr showed Agrochola pulchella in our last posting, October 1.  Today he has the other, equally pretty, Agrochola – Agrochola purpurea.

Agrochola purpurea (Lep.: Noctuidae)  Jochen Moehr

   Jeremy Tatum writes:  Running this site is beginning to interfere with my physics work at UVic.  Recently I have been having to write a great deal about the geometric moment of inertia of a rigid body or a system of particles.  I find that I have frequently mistyped this as the geometrid moment of inertia.  Obviously my mind is not on physics all the time.

I shall have to make an effort to correct this, but don’t be surprised if I inadvertently start to write about geometric moths. For example, I suppose the moth Euclidia ardita (which has been on this site three times) might be described as a geometric moth.  (But not a geometrid – it is an erebid).  Also, a moth’s wing is roughly a triangle – look at the moth’s wing above.  Like any triangle, it has three sides (costa, termen and inner margin) and three angles (tornus, base and apex) so it could fairly be described as geometric.

 

I’m wandering.  To bring me back to reality, Jochen sends yet another moth from the wonderful biodiversity he is seeing in Metchosin.  Regular viewers will recall that in the past I’ve had difficulty in distinguishing between Triphosa haesitata and Coryphista meadii.  I think we finally decided that if the fourth tooth on the outer margin (termen) of the hindwing is shorter than the adjacent teeth, it is Coryphista meadii.  The caterpillar feeds on Berberis and Mahonia.

Coryphista meadii (Lep.:Geometridae)      Jochen Moehr