S.Atlantic : Sorting out the Falklands Moths
Submitted by SARTMA.com (Juanita Brock) 29.07.2009 (Article Archived on 12.08.2009)

The Falkland Islands don’t have a lot of moths – it’s generally too windy; but what they have are really interesting.

Sorting out the Falklands Moths

The Falkland Islands don’t have a lot of moths – it’s generally too windy; but what they have are really interesting. Dr Alex Jones (working for Falklands Conservation) and Revd Dr (Sqn Ldr) Andrew Wakeham-Dawson (Force Chaplain at MPA) have just had a paper published about the pyraloid moths. There are three resident species (but they are not unique to the Falklands; they also live in South America) and a number that find there way here by accident or migrate from Patagonia.

Pyraloid moths are small and brown, but you can tell the species apart by dissecting them. It took a while to identify our specimens, because there was confusion about the identity of the species back at The Natural History Museum, London. This was because the Victorian scientists did not know the true importance of moth bodies for taxonomy. If a body fell off, they sometimes glued back on a random lost body for aesthetic reasons! We have now sorted out the Museum’s collection and illustrate reliable examples in our paper. We are preparing two more papers on Falkland butterflies and moths, and one on hoverflies should be published soon.

If you would like a .pdf version of our paper, please email on andrew@wakeham-dawson.orangehome.co.uk.

                                                                                                                Andrew Wakeham-Dawson