280 days of Urbpandemonium #123

[urbpan]

A lovely cream colored moth with a blue stripe on its pronotum--this was our most exciting moth for much of our bug night. It might have been more interesting as a caterpillar. This moth Halysidota* sp., is a tussock moth, meaning that the larva is a hairy caterpillar with bunches of longer hairs rising above the basic furriness. These are understood to be defensive setae,** preventing the wormlike young from becoming easy prey. When the caterpillar makes a cocoon, it incorporates some of the setae into the pupal case, providing, one supposes, an extra layer of protection.


* This one is fun. Apparently this has gone through several spelling changes, prompting one writer to fume: "Clearly .. it is no casual error of transcription but a rectification of Hübner's bad Greek. Authors of course are at perfect liberty to coin gibberish generic names and so far as my own private tastes are concerned I infinitely prefer a good sonorous gibberish name ... to the general run of would be Greek ones. But when a generic name is manifestly intended to be Greek and more especially when a Greek derivation is printed along with it so as to prevent us which we should otherwise often do from considering it as gibberish most writers conceive that they are at liberty to spell it correctly and reduce it to something like a grammatical form." The original spelling contains the word "halis" which is old Greek meaning "in abundance."