For 130 years, the only known specimen of the Oriental blue clearwing moth was the one caught in 1887 and preserved behind glass in a natural history museum in Vienna, Austria. It was considered a lost species, until a PhD student hiking in Malaysia earlier this year made a stunning discovery.
All kinds of clearwing moths have evolved to be masters of disguise. They have developed long scales meant to look like the furry bodies of bees to make predators afraid of eating them and getting stung. Such developments are known as Batesian mimicry.
And Marta Skowron Volponi, an entomologist from Poland’s University of Gdansk, knew how to see through such a cleverly evolved costume as she made her way through the Malaysian rainforest.
“They’re difficult to locate and usually stay at the same spot only for several minutes,” Volponi explained. “That is why entomologists mainly collect them with the use of synthetic pheromone traps: a method that kills the insects and thus provides information about their morphology only.”
To learn more about the Heterosphecia pahangensis, a particular species of clearwing moth, and how it behaves, Volponi set out to find it.
She said that she was comparing the flight paths of sesiids to their bee and wasp models as part of her PhD dissertation. “I had to record them in flight to do that.”
She and her videographer arrived at a riverbed with a variety of insects swarming about after a strenuous climb. Male clearwing moths would congregate here to harvest salt from the cracks in the rocks to present to the females as a gift during mating rituals.
After a long hike, she and her videographer reached a riverbank with many kinds of insects buzzing around. This is where male clearwing moths would gather to collect salt from between rocks to give to females as a gift during mating rituals.
Volponi remembered how she had just been thinking how difficult it is to spot clearwing moths in the wild when she looked down and saw one — but this clearwing wasn’t like any other she’d ever seen: It was bright blue. “It’s not H. pahangensis, which we came here for, it must be something new,” she remembered. “I haven’t seen anything like it before!”
But as soon as Volponi turned to show it to her videographer and turned back, the moth was gone. “I am convinced I have seen a very unique species (perhaps new to science?) and decide not to stop looking until I find it,” she remembered.
She waited another hour or two, sitting on the riverbank, before she saw a flash of blue. “I call Paolo and he comes running with his bigger camera and we both manage to carefully approach the insect and film it simultaneously,” she said. “It was one of the most amazing moments of my life.”
Volponi had just rediscovered the Oriental blue clearwing, also known as Heterosphecia tawonoides, alive and healthy, in contrast to the 130-year-old fading specimen in the Vienna collection. She is already learning amazing things about the moth’s flight habits, which appear to likewise resemble the flight patterns of the bees and wasps that the moth evolved to resemble.
And she is committed to assisting the unique moth stay safe in the wild, along with fellow conservationists at Global Wildlife Conservation (GWC), a group looking to rediscover multiple extinct species.
0 Comments