A few weeks ago, Florida resident Erin Sullivan was watering a tree in her backyard garden when she noticed something moving around on the ground. She wasn’t sure what she’d just seen, so she looked closer.
“My hose went across this leaf area, and I saw this little bit of movement, and at first I thought it was light, and then I was like, ‘Oh, no, there’s something there,’” Sullivan told The Dodo.
Sullivan’s eyes landed on a tiny white creature, who looked remarkably like a miniature, 2-inch-long owl. Of course, owls aren’t that small, and Sullivan quickly realized the little animal was actually a moth.
“I was like, ‘Oh my gosh, that moth totally looks like an owl,’” Sullivan said.
Sullivan held her breath as she took out her phone to record a video,
but to her surprise, the moth didn’t seem bothered by her presence. The black-and-white moth fluttered around, crawling over the leaf litter, for several minutes.
“I thought it would fly away, but it didn’t; it just kind of hung out and started flapping its little wings,” Sullivan said.
As soon as she got back inside, Sullivan posted a video of the moth to her Instagram page, where many commenters compared the insect to snowy owls, specifically Hedwig, the owl from Harry Potter.
“[It looked like] a little Hogwarts character,” Sullivan said.
Luckily, an entomologist named Matthew Nochisaki was among the commenters on Sullivan’s post, and he helped Sullivan identify the moth as a female black-etched prominent. Based on the black-etched prominent’s behavior, Nochisaki guessed that she had just emerged from her larval stage.
“He said that it probably … was flapping its wings because it was warming them up so it would be able to fly,” Sullivan said.
Nochisaki also explained that black-etched prominents get all the nutrients they need when they’re caterpillars, and don’t eat in their adult phase. That explains why they have such tiny, cute faces — they have no need for mouths.
Beyond their adorable appearance, moths actually play a crucial role in their local ecosystems.
“[M]oths are pollinators, and we need as many pollinators as we can get,” Sullivan said. “Everybody thinks about bees, but they don’t really think about moths.”
Sullivan is overjoyed that she got to have an up-close encounter with such a unique species. Now when she’s in her backyard, she keeps an eye out for insects that look like tiny owls.
