Thursday, March 10, 2011

Some Moths from the Files

Recently I started re-examining some of my unidentified moths from last year to see if a second or third look might turn up IDs for some of them. So far I have been mostly successful. A few are probably not identifiable, but there are others that I probably overlooked while I was working on some of the larger and easier moths. Leading off this post is a Small Mottled Willow Moth (Spodoptera exigua), a species introduced from southeast Asia.

The small moth appears to be a Kearfott's Rolandylis Moth (Rolandylis maiana). 

It took a few trips through the same set of moth plates for me to figure out that this is probably a Decodes basiplagana, a tortricid that appears to lack a common name.

After I posted this on Flickr, Ali Iyoob suggested Palmerworm Moth (Dichomeris ligulella), which seems to fit the shape of this moth pretty well. Sometimes it pays to revisit unsolved identification problems!