The best kind of green thumb…a perch for a Luna Moth. Photo: M. Talabac
Q: I found a huge green moth on my front door! What is it, and do they visit flowers so I can attract more?
A: This beauty is one of my favorite insects…a Luna Moth, a native species and one of our largest North American moths. Their green color, rare among our local moths and butterflies, ranges from medium to pale celery-green or a pistachio ice cream hue. Their long hindwing tails and eyespots combine to give them a look resembling an elephant’s face. I imagine those eyes give foraging birds a moment’s pause, though the bigger predator for these moths is probably bats since they are night-flying.
Adults have vestigial mouthparts and cannot feed, so flowers won’t attract them. They rely on body fat stored from the caterpillar stage (which grows gleefully big) to fuel their brief search for mates and egg-laying sites. You can support breeding populations by caring for caterpillar host plants, which for Luna include hickory, walnut, sweet gum, and white oak, among other trees.
Avoiding pesticide use in home landscapes is of critical importance, though communities that are subjected to aerial forest sprays for Spongy Moth or other pests may, unfortunately, experience population declines, even though such treatments are relatively targeted. Gardeners attempting to rid a tree of nuisance aphids, Spotted Lanternfly, scale, and other insects could inadvertently affect harmless species like these moths in the process. Remember that any tree roots infiltrating a lawn that is treated with a systemic insecticide (like for grubs) might absorb some of those chemicals and transport them into the canopy.
Light pollution is another big detriment to these and many night-active insects (like fireflies), with home landscape accent lighting, porch lights, street lights, and other sources of illumination interfering with their ability to navigate at night.
For anyone curious about moths, I encourage you to participate in or follow National Moth Week, a citizen science project taking place the last full week of July each year. Check out what visits your porch lights, flowers (there are some day-flying nectar-feeding moths), and see if you can ID the caterpillars that wander the landscape or chew holes in tree, shrub, or perennial leaves. So few are truly pests so you won’t need to worry about managing them; leave them to fulfill their part in the food web of our local ecosystem.
You can also sign up to learn about nighttime pollinators and how to support them in the upcoming free webinar: “Working the Night Shift: Pollination After Dark,” taking place on August 3 from noon to 1:30 pm.
By Miri Talabac, Horticulturist, University of Maryland Extension Home & Garden Information Center. Miri writes the Garden Q&A for The Baltimore Sun and Washington Gardener Magazine. Read more by Miri.
Have a plant or insect question? The University of Maryland Extension has answers! Send your questions and photos to Ask Extension. Our horticulturists are available to answer your questions online, year-round.
The last full week of July is National Moth Week, and I encourage everyone to take a closer look at the vast diversity of moths that fill our natural world. Butterflies and moths belong to the same insect group, but moths far outnumber butterflies in species diversity. Since many moths have muted colors or fly at night, we’re largely unaware of this bounty. Let’s take a whirlwind appreciation tour of the group to illustrate the amazing, bizarre, and quirky features of this major insect order.
Rosy Maple MothCoffee-loving Pyrausta Moth
Moth adults come in all shapes and sizes, and like butterflies, wings are their most prominent feature. There are “micro-moths” whose wingspans are less than an inch, and giant “silk moths” up to 6 inches, making them the largest moths in North America. (Our native silk moths are not closely related to true silk moths, but they got the name because people thought they could be farmed for silk.) The wings of some moths look like mere slivers, seemingly insufficient for flight, while others are tucked around their body so they look fairly cylindrical. Some lay so flat at rest with their wings spread that you’d swear they were two-dimensional.
Take a look at these two videos from Harford County Master Gardeners full of information about the native monarch caterpillars and tussock moths that feed on native milkweed plants.
Other than because I think they are pretty, I love looking at plants and their flowers. In fact, one of my pastimes has become figuring where and what is the reward that pollinators get out of their visits to their favorite flowers. You may be now thinking that my pastime is a bit nonsensical, since it is pretty clear that pollinators get pollen and nectar from flowers, so why bother checking? Well, actually, that is only partially true; did you know there’s a myriad of rewards that pollinators can get from their flower visits?
In today’s post I want to tell you a bit about some of those other rewards; the ones that fascinate me so much. Let’s talk about special floral pollination rewards and where you can see them in real life!
We like essential oils, some pollinators like floral oils!
The first time I heard about floral oils my mind was blown in such a way that I became obsessed with them, to the point that now a large part of my research programfocuses on them. Floral oils are a reward that many types of plants offer to their favorite pollinators: oil-bees.
But don’t let me get ahead of myself! Floral oils are a special type of oil – different from essential oils – that are produced and presented to pollinators on different parts of the flowers of some plants. Independently of what exactly they look like, all these plants are visited and pollinated in a very specialized way by oil-bees. Unlike honeybees, these oil-bees are solitary and make their nests in the ground. These oils help these bees line their nests to waterproof (!!) and strengthen them. Along with that, they also mix the oils with pollen and feed that ‘pollen ball’ to their larvae.
The whorled yellow loosestrife (left; photo: Eli Sagor) is one of Maryland’s native plants that offers floral oils to their Macropis oil-bees (right; photo: Don Harvey). Note the shiny load of oils and pollen on the hind legs of this Macropis!
Oil flowers are present all around the globe. In our region, they are represented by several species of the yellow loosetrife plant genus Lysimachia. With their floral oil rewards, these loosestrifes sustain the rare oil-bees of the genus Macropis. At the level of the country, most oil-flowers (and their specialized pollinators) are restricted to the Southern USA, where they are visited by the large bee genus Centris. Some of these plants are the wild crapemyrtle, the prairie bur, and the purple pleatleaf.
Hungry? Please, help yourself!
Along with nectar, pollen, and floral oils, food for pollinators can come in many different shapes and forms. In fact, some flowers even offer parts of their flowers to their pollinators. In cases like this, flowers develop special structures – usually around their petals – with the only function of becoming food for pollinators. Flowers providing this type of reward are usually pollinated by beetles, who can use their strong mandibles to chew on and eat the special structures.
Sweet shrubs display nutritious structures to their pollinators, small sap-feeding beetles of the family Nitidulidae. Photo: Wikipedia commons.
One of the coolest examples of the use of this type of reward is our very own sweet shrub, Calycanthus floridus. This spring flowering plant (flowering right now in Maryland!) attracts small beetles that enter the flower and stay there for quite some time. To maintain and support them while they are helping the plant reproduce, the sweet shrub flowers englobes them during parts of their flowering (this is why sometimes these flowers seem to be opening and closing throughout the day) and present small extremely nutritious structures at the base of their petals. It is on these structures that the beetles can feed on to stay strong and healthy while they are on the flowers. If you have one of these flowers in your yard, or happen to see them in one of your walks, take a second to stop and check them; you may get to meet their little beetle friends!
Need a hand taking care of the kids? Here I am!
Some other flowers have established even more intricate relationships with their pollinators, and what they provide is not just food, but also a house! Because in these plants the offered reward is a place for the larvae of these pollinators, these interactions are called ‘nursery pollination’. Here, the pollinator visits the plants, collects pollen, and sometimes even actively places pollen on the flower tip. By doing so, the pollinator makes sure that the plant seeds develop. This is important, because their larvae will need some of them to feed on throughout their development.
Joshua trees (left; photo: Shawn Kinkade) are some of the most iconic plants of the US Southwest. These plants offer a brood site to their super-specialized small moth pollinators (right; photo: Judy Gallagher).
Along with this being the reward we see in a plant we love to eat (figs!), one of the most spectacular examples of the use of this reward is found in an iconic plant of the deserts of the US Southwest, the Joshua tree. Indeed, Joshua trees produce flowers that are visited by a group of moths, the Yucca moths. These moths visit the flowers, collect their pollen, and then literally push it into the flower tip to actively pollinate it. Because the moths lay eggs on the flowers, this assures that the flower develops seeds so the larvae have something to feed on. What is fascinating, though, is that these larvae never eat all the seeds, so this really is a win-win relationship between the plant and the moth.
Larvae of the Yucca moths feed on a Joshua tree’s seeds. To make sure that there is something for their larvae to eat, these moths actively pollinate the plants, exchanging a brood site for pollination, and in the process display some of the most fascinating behaviors one can see in pollinators. Check out the video to see it for yourself! Video: University of Nebraska-Lincoln.
By Anahí Espíndola, Assistant Professor, Department of Entomology, University of Maryland, College Park. See more posts by Anahí.
