Deadwood Borer (8514)

Scolecocampa liburna

Family Erebidae, subfamily Erebinae

Photograph copyright by Sam Galick

8 July 2012

Near Whitesboro

CMMP block S07

Distribution map

We return to the "massive assemblage" of moths in the superfamily Noctuoidea and to the large and varied family Erebidae, which occupies 38 plates in the Beadle and Leckie guide. Little is known of this species' habits and ecology, but it is suspected that the caterpillar eats fungus in decaying wood. Either Deadwood Borers are attracted only uncommonly to lights or the species is not at all common, as we have found only a few, with Sam's nice find very early this morning being the subject of this essay's photo.

One quick bit of minutiae to point out:  Don't go looking for Deadwood Borer (or Dead-wood Borer Moth; see previous comment about English nomenclature) in the index to Beadle and Leckie, at least not by the common name, as it is not indexed under any option ("Dead-wood," "Borer," or "Moth"). However, a search under the genus name will be successful. Long-and-involved indices of books usually have at least a few problems, but this is the first one that I've found in this book. I do, however, question the utility of the decision to index both the text and plate entries for every species, as they are on facing pages.

We are obviously getting into the peak of the moth season, because numbers and variety have climbed tremendously just in the past couple of weeks; I have two good examples to prove the point. The first is from this most recent night, a night that I should have found myself wandering over to Sam Galick's place (as I had on the two previous nights!). That is because Sam reports photographing some 80 or so species at his porch and black lights from dusk until the first Northern Cardinal sang near dawn.

The other example comes from Mike Crewe's moth trap. On the morning of 22 June 2012, I helped Mike go through the trap that he'd had out all the previous night, an the final tally of species from that haul is 91. I joined him again in this endeavor yesterday morning (7 July 2012). What Mike does is capture from the trap and release out the door any individuals of species that he can immediately ID, and retains all those individuals that he cannot. Obviously, the common species are the ones most readily ID'ed due to previous experience, but it was still more than surprising to me when the final tally just of Mottled Grass-veneers was 596, which outnumbered all other species combined! Me being the official scribe and tallier, at the end of the endeavor (which took quite a few hours to complete!), I tallied the number of species listed that he had released straight out of the trap: 68. So, combining that with the easily 40+ species that he photographed because he could not ID them, the final tally will certainly be well above 100. And that's from a relatively habitat-poor locations on Cape Island!