At this time of summer, I like to set up our moth light and see what decides to come through our window and pay us a visit.
This is our light, it glows a pretty fluorescent blue colour.
Anyway, we've had some very interesting moths coming in the last week or so. We got this beautiful garden tiger moth.
I took this photo of it sitting patiently on my Dad's hand before we let it go into the garden.
My favourite one this week was this Poplar Hawk moth that flew in. It was Huge! I actually heard it flying before I found it, it sounded like a small bird!
Here it is sitting on my Dad's finger.
These were about the biggest ones that came in this week, we also got a ton of what are known as "Macro" moths since they are so tiny and a variety of fairly normal sized moths too.
We previously had like a yellow light and for some reason it didn't seem to attract any moths at all. I discovered that moths are senstive to UV light in particular which is why we switched to the blue UV and that they are positively phototactic. Phototaxis is a phenomena in organisms in which they either move towards or away from a light source- e.g. you might see beetles or cockroaches run and hide once a house light has been turned on.They are negatively phototactic. Some Lepidopterists are of the opinion that moths actually have a wee internal navigation system like a compass and actually use the moon as a reference to navigate at night and can plan their flight paths by it! So they think that artificial light attracts them because it's related to their orientation. However when they actually reach this "light" it can totally disorientate them because they weren't expecting to actually be able to get to this "moon". Funny huh? That's why they appear to fly about in a drunken stupor and bang into your light. Anyway, sorry for the science lesson, you can stop yourself being bored from reading and just look at the pretty pictures.
Not much else to report, I was busy making a new video for our special competition in Sadie's wonderful 'The Abominable Apothecary' .Horror fun and games, set to an old fear factory track, you can check it here
And then the street lights came on and the journal ended. The end.
This is our light, it glows a pretty fluorescent blue colour.
Anyway, we've had some very interesting moths coming in the last week or so. We got this beautiful garden tiger moth.
I took this photo of it sitting patiently on my Dad's hand before we let it go into the garden.
My favourite one this week was this Poplar Hawk moth that flew in. It was Huge! I actually heard it flying before I found it, it sounded like a small bird!
Here it is sitting on my Dad's finger.
These were about the biggest ones that came in this week, we also got a ton of what are known as "Macro" moths since they are so tiny and a variety of fairly normal sized moths too.
We previously had like a yellow light and for some reason it didn't seem to attract any moths at all. I discovered that moths are senstive to UV light in particular which is why we switched to the blue UV and that they are positively phototactic. Phototaxis is a phenomena in organisms in which they either move towards or away from a light source- e.g. you might see beetles or cockroaches run and hide once a house light has been turned on.They are negatively phototactic. Some Lepidopterists are of the opinion that moths actually have a wee internal navigation system like a compass and actually use the moon as a reference to navigate at night and can plan their flight paths by it! So they think that artificial light attracts them because it's related to their orientation. However when they actually reach this "light" it can totally disorientate them because they weren't expecting to actually be able to get to this "moon". Funny huh? That's why they appear to fly about in a drunken stupor and bang into your light. Anyway, sorry for the science lesson, you can stop yourself being bored from reading and just look at the pretty pictures.
Not much else to report, I was busy making a new video for our special competition in Sadie's wonderful 'The Abominable Apothecary' .Horror fun and games, set to an old fear factory track, you can check it here
And then the street lights came on and the journal ended. The end.
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