Tweet

Taxon: Ascalapha odorata (Linnaeus)
Family: Erebidae

Collector: tdwightsmith      

Date: 2012-09-13

Verbatim Date: 2012-09-13

Locality: United States, California

34.04473  -118.36524 +-11034m.

Occurrence Remarks: I was house-sitting; as I recall, it was evening (but the photo time-stamp says it was before 6:00 AM. I think that is wrong.); many doors and windows were open; I discovered this - is it a moth? - on the wall of the service porch. I'd never seen such a creature at this location before. I do recall seeing such creatures - very large moths - in the summer of 1984, at night in the LA Colliseum during late night rehearsals of the Opening Ceremonies for the Summer Olympics. There were scores of the moths all over the field, but I did not see any of those close-up. On 9/13/12, when I attempted to relocate the moth outside, it simply crawled onto my hand, then my shirt. When it was on my hand, its wings were spread open, and it vibrated very, very fast. It was gorgeous. I turned off the service porch light, brought it outside and closed the door and released it. p.s. By the time I tried to identify the moth, and learned of its folklore, it was chilling to read that visits by this moth are considered a harbinger of death by some cultures. Indeed...that turned out to have been true in this specific instance.

Establishment Means: wild

Specimen Images

Open Medium Image

Open Large Image

Open Medium Image

Open Large Image

Record Id: 1d2c5469-4a1e-488e-b7af-3121ffe6f9d4

Occurrence ID (GUID): http://www.inaturalist.org/observations/803369

For additional information on this occurrence, please contact: Ken-ichi Ueda (kueda@inaturalist.org)