Polyphemus Moths

[clovisoid]

I saw Bone2stone's moth post, and thought of these pictures I took a couple of weeks back. Every year we get a pretty good flock of Polyphemus moths in our yard. I'm not sure if they come to breed or come to die, but they are pretty cool moths. This year I think we had about 15 or 20 of them over a period of a week or so. They always seem to land on the ground, I don't see their caterpillars, and our dog is scared of them.



Some of the color variation.

[Havenhunter]

Cool pics! Those "eyes" on their wings are intended to frighten away predators. Very effective as you've noted with your dog.
I'm partial to the Luna moths seen very rarely.

[CMD]

Those are beautiful. They look like a "smiling" face of sorts as well, with a sinuous mouth below the eyes. And their wings become big ears. Actually a good visage for Halloween!

[clovisoid]

Those are beautiful. They look like a "smiling" face of sorts as well, with a sinuous mouth below the eyes. And their wings become big ears. Actually a good visage for Halloween!

I didn't think about that, but they are appropriate for Halloween.

[Hoss]

They are really colorful little moths.

[painshill]

Beautiful! The adult moths don't live for more than a week. They don't have properly developed mouthparts to enable them to feed. The male spends that time looking for mates and the female spends most of that time laying eggs if it has managed to mate. That's a male in the first picture (the feathery antennae are larger). Caterpillars are yellow to greenish yellow and usually bristly, becoming bright lime green after their final moult.

[Hoss]

Something in your yard attracts them. For them to come and mate there there must be something the caterpillars like to eat.

[painshill]

Something in your yard attracts them. For them to come and mate there there must be something the caterpillars like to eat.

Mostly birch, cherry, elm, hickory, maple, oak, pear, sassafras, walnut, willow and any tree of the citrus family (orange, lemon, lime etc).

[gregszybala]

I think in Clovisoids case it must be the crabgrass, looks just like my yard!

Not sure if this is the same species?

[painshill]

Another beauty. They’re both saturniid moths from the Giant Silkworm Moth subfamily Saturniinae. Yours is the Cecropia silkmoth, Hyalophora cecropia. Clovisoids’s is Antheraea polyphemus. The caterpillars of both species feed on the same trees as mentioned above.

Incidentally, Jess's original "moth" picture that sparked these posts is in fact a butterfly and not a moth... although I couldn't identify it from the closed wing picture.

[sailorjoe]

Clovisoid: Thanks for this post. And to the rest of the commenters, especially Painshill, a big thanks also. Because of the responses I think I just learned more about moths than I ever knew before.

[clovisoid]

Mostly birch, cherry, elm, hickory, maple, oak, pear, sassafras, walnut, willow and any tree of the citrus family (orange, lemon, lime etc).

We have oak, a couple of types of acacia & palms, and mango & citrus trees next door.

[clovisoid]

I think in Clovisoids case it must be the crabgrass, looks just like my yard!

When we moved here I thought it was crab grass and tried to control it, but it's what Floridians call St. Augustine Grass. (I'm pretty sure it's just a fancy name for a different type of crabgrass.)

[Ron Kelley]

Probably more hardy than a lot of grasses. My yard is whatever was in the farm field plus some white clover that I seeded.

[Bone2stone]

Nice to see we guys are not "Bugged" (pun intended) by the beauty of the winged creatures that have no feathers.