Wednesday 2 October 2013

A tiger on the weatherboards

And so there I was, wondering what an earth I was going to write about today — especially when I'd left my run so late — when I noticed a flash of orange.


This is Ceryx sphenodes, a tiger moth (Arctiidae) with a very restricted distribution between Mossman and Innisfail in Far North Queensland. It was described by Meyrick in 1886 from three specimens collected in the Cairns area. Ceryx darlingtoni Obraztsov,1957 is a synonym. I mention this because the type material for that species comes from Lake Barrine, which is just over there. *points* That specimen, a single female moth, was collected by Philip Jackson Darlington Jr, while on his first trip to Australia in the early 1930s. Darlington later became an inmportant and influential figure in evolutionary biology and biogeography, especially of the southern hemisphere (although he wasn't very keen on plate tectonics).