(Written about 10 am on the 13th).
I'm going to try to do a few of these, given that for some reason I can't get google/blogger to talk to my Apple photo cache any more, so I can't post photos from my phone on here, which kind of stinks, because typing on the phone is a pain, and the latest update (well, the latest update minus one, I haven't tried it with the new security patch that was loaded overnight) had TERRIBLE voice to text recognition (I don't have an unusual accent and it used to recognize me but now it's wildly wrong when I try to use it).
So anyway, a photo for today, from several days ago
It's a polyphemus moth. Probably Antheraea Polyphemus. They're related to silkworms (I don't know if you can make silk from the cocoons, though, and I don't know that they're destructive in the way Lymantra dispar is (the common name on that contains what some now regard as a slur to the Roma people, so, I don't know if we have a new common name* or not but I can remember it as Lymantra). Of course Lymantra is an invasive in the US and Polyphemus is native here.
(*oh hey yes, you can call it the "spongy moth" which makes me laugh so maybe I use that with my classes now)
These creatures don't live long; they don't have functional mouthparts (unlike some moths and butterflies that eat nectar); they only live about a week and they exist to mate, lay eggs, and die. Which looking at that with a human bias, that seems kind of sad, but then again: will moths ever write symphonies or novels or draw maps?
The other thing that always weirds me out if I think much about it is the metamorphosis process: lepidopterans dissolve into a puddle of goo, leaving behind "imaginal disks" that direct reorganization of what's left into the adult.
There's a short essay here (Scientific American) that talks about it, and here are some photos from a natural historian who raises silkmoths and had one that "oopsied" and somehow metamorphosed without a cocoon (so apparently the "puddle of goo" was an overstatement)
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