Too bad this moth already had a common name. I'd have called it the Oriental Warlord Moth. Just look at the inscrutable face on the example in the middle, below. That example, mostly purplish reds, is somewhat unusual for the degree of dark color. Larry Line found a similar one pictured in a book on the silkmoths of North America. It came from West Virginia. As I was making this page I went out to check around the lights, and watched as the more typical example at right, below, came in to settle beneath the mercury vapor lamp. Their wings sound like flapping sandpaper hitting the driveway or house wall.

The female at left, above, left me a present in the plastic jug in which I had kept her for about 30 minutes in the Moth Fridge. When I slid her out onto the photo table in the Moth Lounge, some of her marble-like eggs rolled out beside her. Others were rather tackily sticking to the side of the clear plastic jug. I placed them all in a clear-topped collecting container and forgot about them. Eleven nights later I was turning off the floodlamps after finishing the photos session for the night when I noticed a motion near my eyeglasses, where I had placed them while I worked, at the rear of the photo table. All those eggs, every one!!!, had just hatched or was in the process of hatching. Back on went the lights!  I took the lid of the little storage container and the larva began climbing over the rim, starting to disperse. I cooed to the little babies as I snapped away, adjusting the lights, etc. They were about 2 mm in length, not much more than a blur before my naked eye. I didn't know what they really looked like until saw the photos in the review window of the camera. [ photos of larva all on 08/11/2004 ]  In the last photo a portion of the eggshell remains attached to the read end of the larva. This is normally eaten by the young caterpillar, its only "animal" food.

After photographing the larva, I picked up the entire folding table and took it out to the garden and blew the tiny larva into the vegetation of a large clump of naturalized daylilies. I didn't occur to me to attempt to place them on trees that are known to constitute larval food for this species. But a rich source of the leaves of such trees exists just across the garden path, in a thicket of saplings with which I have been doing annual battle, unsuccessfully, to eradicate. I will be looking for cocoons there this coming winter in the hope of watching the other end of the larval cycle and seeing the emergence of next year's adults.