Afternoon InquisitionScience

AI: National Moth Week!

National Moth Week is a new project celebrating moths and biodiversity in the US. Mark your calendars for July 23-29, 2012.

Why moths? Moths can be found everywhere from inner cities to heavily forested remote areas.  You might dismiss moths as boring brown fluttery things, but Moth Week is a great time to look more closely.

They can be amazing mimics; they can be as tiny as the head of a pin. They can be huge with surprising underwing patterns, like the moth on the Moth Week Logo.   The purpose of Moth Week is two-fold; to encourage people to go outside and look at the life around them, and also to encourage people to document and submit what they see as part of a larger citizen science project.

You don’t need to know what you are looking at to participate–if you post your images on the Discover Life site (following the protocol), they will identify them for you!

National Moth Week logo

You can find instructions for having a Moth Party at your house on the Discover Life website, too.  I plan to have a Moth Night Celebration at my house in Connecticut.   I live in a perfect area for mothing–streams, a big pond, forest, and agricultural land all near me.  We’ll get lots of interesting insects, including moths.

Join me in being one Bad Moth-er…
(Shut your mouth!)

What about you? Do you think you’ll participate? Is standing around at night looking at bugs your kind of party? If not, what is your kind of party?

The Afternoon Inquisition (or AI) is a question posed to you, the Skepchick community. Look for it to appear Tuesdays, Thursdays, Saturdays, and Sundays at 3pm ET.

Some resources:

Bug_girl

Bug_girl has a PhD in Entomology, and is a pointy-headed former academic living in Ohio. She is obsessed with insects, but otherwise perfectly normal. Really! If you want a daily stream of cool info about bugs, follow her Facebook page or find her on Twitter.

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5 Comments

  1. I LOVE moths! Last week I got to poke around in McGill university’s entomology labs and look at their bug collection and I soooo loved the moths. I get such a kick out of all that… I don’t know, the diversity of forms from a finite set of constitutive elements, I guess. This basic biological strategy and emerging from that SO much aesthetic variation and all these beautiful specifics. Definitely my kind of party!

  2. Quick check in to say I never really thought about moths, which is why I love what I learn at Skepchick and I am so behind National Moth Week, and I want to support it and life is amazing and interesting and…so…tired…can’t formulate coherent…zzzzzz

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