This week, we explore the secret world of moths and find out whatour fluttery friends tell us about our campus environment.
Dan: Hello, I'm Dan Hall and I work here at Warwick. I'm a keen birdwatcher, moth enthusiast, and I'm fascinated by the wildlife here on campus. Welcome back to Autumn at Warwick. In this episode, we'll be exploring the secret world of moths.
We've probably got over 30 species of moths, which is really good. We've caught quite a few autumnal moths in the trap overnight, but also quite a lot of common moths, which is really good. Catching Common moths is great because that shows us that the habitat is healthy.
We can see there is a moth that looks like an autumn leaf, that's a dusky thorn moth. They're relatively common at this time of year, we caught a couple of those in the trap.
You can see that this one's now warming up to fly away and it's been quite cool this morning. And they're now starting to warm up. It's beating its wings furiously ready to take off. So here, one of my favorite moths for two reasons. This is an angle shades moth.
I like it because it's, it's unusual in shape. It's really pretty. They're kind of pinky when they're fresh. And we at home actually raised one of these moths. We found a caterpillar on a dandelion leaf in our garden.
And we were about to feed this dandelion leaf to our bearded dragon at home. We rescued the caterpillar off the dandelion leaf and basically kept it fed it bramble leaves, the caterpillar grew and grew, as caterpillars do, turned into a pupa. And a couple of months later, one of these hatched out and we released it in our garden.
If you're interested in moths there are lots of things you can do. There are going to be more moth surveys on campus, I'm sure, and more wildlife events on campus generally.
So, I would encourage people to join butterfly conservation, which will tell you more about what you can do to improve your own gardens for butterflies and moths. That's a really good group that you can get involved in.
Meet Dan Hall
In this episode, Dan Hall, from Modern Languages and Cultures, leads a moth survey to find out what species we have, how many, and what they tell us about the biodiversity on campus.
Dan's Top Tips:
To make your garden more moth-friendly, leave a wild area of long grass, brambles, ivy, nettles or even just weeds. Honeysuckle and fruit trees are also great for attracting moths and butterflies.
You can also click the 'Notify' button in the top right-hand corner of the Sustainability Events page to keep updated on upcoming events, including biodiversity walks and surveys.
Download theiNaturalist app to help us keep track of the wildlife we have at Warwick.
