Spend a moment in our Butterfly Rainforest Rearing Lab with Ryan talking about the African moon moth, Argema mimosae, which is related to our native Luna moth. This nocturnal silk moth species is native to eastern and southern regions of Africa. They do not have a mouth, and don’t eat or drink in this life stage.
You’ll see males of these moths in the Butterfly Rainforest exhibit, while the females stay in our Rearing Lab so they don’t lay eggs everywhere!
Transcript
Hello, and welcome back to the Butterfly Rainforest at the Florida Museum of Natural History. Or more specifically the Rearing Lab of the Butterfly Rainforest.
My name is Ryan and today we’re going to show off and talk about the African moon moth. And that’s what we have dangling right here from her cocoon. I’m gonna gently wake her up and have her flop down on the ground there. Here she is. If she looks familiar, it’s because she is very closely related to the Luna moth native here in the eastern United States and it’s often confused for a luna moth, but the tails are longer. They will eventually cross when her wings are fully formed, and you’ll note that there is a color difference here. Where a luna moth’s tails are one solid, yellowish-greenish color.
The reason why we’re doing the talk here inside the Rearing Lab is because this is a female African moon moth. As with other silk moths, when we get species like this, we’re not allowed to let any of them breed. So for the butterflies we just don’t give them a host plant. But these guys have many many host plants, so we kept keep the sexes separate. The females stay here in the lab. The males go out into the exhibit. This is because females will lay their eggs even if they don’t mate, and we don’t want eggs all over the place inside of the exhibit. And since they don’t have a mouth or a proboscis, they can’t eat or drink anything, so they can keep their entire lives here inside the lab for us all to observe and enjoy.
I hope you’ve enjoyed and I hope you have a great rest of the day. Thank you.
About the Butterfly Rainforest exhibit
Support the exhibitVideo by Ryan Fessenden; Produced by Radha Krueger