Top Ten Facts About Moths

Here are some facts about these underrated cousins of butterflies

The Top Ten

1 Some moth species drink tears and even blood of other animals

The Hemiceratoides hieroglyphica feeds on the tears of birds. It uses its thin and long proboscis to pierce into the eyelid of the sleeping bird, use the hook on its proboscis to anchor it, and suck the tears. Sometimes the moth spits anaesthetic to the eye of the bird so it would stay asleep when it sucks the tears

Wow! Creepy but cool

2 Some species don't have mouths in their adult stage

Thus making them unable to eat and die about a week later after coming out of the cocoon

3 Moths can emit ultrasonic signals to jam bat sonars

They have highly developed ultrasonic emitters in their thorax. Weird thing is, some species of hawkmoth produce the ultrasonic sonar-scrambling signals from their...genitals...

4 Moths are attracted to beer

Make a mixture of beer, bananas, and molasses, paint the mixture on tree trunks, and you havw yourself a moth night club

5 Moths are great in mimicking other objects

They mimic anything. A hornet (hornet moth), a hummingbird (hummingbird hawkmoth), a spider (Lygodium spider moth), bird dropping, etc

6 Some moths are active at day

7 A male silkworm moth can sense female moths far away

Up to a whooping 7 miles away!

8 Moth sizes range from only 2-3 millimetres of wingspan to the size of a plate

The smallest moth is the Nepticulid moth, while the largest is the Atlas moth

9 There are 9 times more species of moth than butterflies

There are about 160,000 species of moth known, while for butterflies, only about 17,500 species

10 Moths love lamps

The Contenders

11 Not all moths are boring plain brown in color

Yeah, I looked up the Atlas moth you mentioned, it has a really pretty orange pattern.

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