The miller moth is hard to love, but it deserves our respect

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“They’re not exactly intelligent, but they’re doing the best they can.” (via highcountrynews)

for “get rid of moths” left orbit. Over a group chat, I asked friends how they were handling this seasonal visitor. “I find miller moths in my closet, my bathroom, and sometimes in my bed. I get a washcloth and wet the tip—my moth katana—and twirl that sucker for the nightly harvest,” said Jack Martin. “My wife left me to join the miller moth migration,” joked Sam Krason, while Connor Rafferty, a graphic designer, offered a vivid tableau.

After a wet winter, moths the size of dollar coins and the color of dehydrated mulch cascade onto Wyoming, Colorado and New Mexico from their nesting sites in the High Plains. Beginning with the June migration, the miller, or army cutworm moth, touches nearly every denizen in the region—their faces, their pillows, their window panes—but rarely their hearts.

“They’re not exactly intelligent, but they’re doing the best they can,” said Maia Holmes, a Colorado State University entomologist. “So, when you find them ramming themselves up against your window at a time or place you don’t want them, they’re just lost and confused.” Even though the miller moth aggravates human beings, flowering plants and other animals delight in its arrival. The army cutworm begins life as a green-striped caterpillar munching on grasslands and fields at lower elevations.

As industrial agriculture transformed the landscape of the West in the late 1800s, the human relationship to native insects changed, too. “Historically speaking, the moth wasn’t a problem,” said Holmes. “Then we start growing a lot of corn and wheat for money. Army cutworms were like, ‘Great, there’s more food.’ But humans were like, ‘Wait a minute, we use these crops for money.

 

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