Moonlight Becomes You

Some childhood memories just seem to stick with you, lodging in your grey matter and coming back to haunt you at random intervals.

One that has been showing up quite frequently on the mental playlist lately harkens all the way back to a stint at Girl Guide Camp at Bird’s Hill Park, just northeast of Winnipeg over 20 years ago. It was a dark and muggy mid-June night as we trucked off as a group of giggling girls to the public washrooms. In the orange haze of the sodium lights, we heard a shriek of fright and immediately thought a bear had found its way into the campsite. Nervous, we crept around the corner toward the source of the sound and found girls from another troupe cowering under the lights over the door, pointing to the wall.

The source of their terror? Luna moths.

Looking back, I can see how these fluttering, green giants could scare the bejeepers out of a bunch of city girls. However, I was more fascinated than frightened by these enormous moths; still am.

I went a couple decades without seeing them again until one June day a few years ago. A friend came into work at the resort on Hecla Island and announced that they had a giant green moth on their door screen. Needless to say, I was over there with the camera in short order. The image above was the result.

There’s just something compelling about these ghostly green insects that float, like the moonbeams their named for, through the early summer nights.  With a wingspan of about 4 inches, they’re one of the largest moths in Canada and arguably one of the most beautiful; but few people get the chance to see them. They’re nocturnal and only exist in their adult form for about a week, so to catch a glimpse of these beauties, timing is truly everything.

They actually have a lot in common with a much more abundant and much less revered insect that emerges a few weeks later here in the north woods, namely the fishfly. Like its very distant cousin, adult luna moths have one purpose: to mate and deposit eggs to ensure the next generation. Like fishflies, these Saturnid moths have no mouths and do not feed. Their large, fuzzy bodies and consequently larger energy reserves from their larval stage allow them to live longer than the fragile fishfly.

In the dark labyrinth of the nighttime forest, finding a suitable mate is hard work, so male lunas can travel kilometres, tasting the air with their antennae for the pheromones drifting from a ‘wick’ extending from the abdomen of a waiting female.  Because they’re needed for this function, the antennae of male luna moths are much larger and fluffier than those of females, making the sexes fairly easy to tell apart. The moth pictured above is a female. Once the sexes find each other, they lock together in copulation for up to 20 hours before she sets off to lay her eggs. A female can produce up to 300 eggs, scattering them around the forest, a half dozen or so at a time, on the underside of birch leaves to incubate for almost two weeks.

The larvae are just as impressive as the adults, a bright, almost fluorescent green caterpillar that you can find trundling along the trunks and branches of its host plant, munching away on the leaves and growing up to 4 inches long by the time it sheds its exoskeleton for the fifth time (a process known as ecdysis).

Up here in Manitoba, where the summers are not long enough to allow for two generations, lunas overwinter as pupae in their cocoons. It isn’t until the following June that they will emerge from this stasis, all crumpled and fragile. Slowly, over at least half an hour, the new moth will pump hemolymph (insect blood) into their wings, ‘blowing them up’ until they harden into their characteristic green sails. It’s an event you can witness first-hand if you’re lucky enough to find a caterpillar before it pupates and keep it at home over winter. I’m actually planning to try and do just that later this summer so that I won’t miss the emergence of one of my favourite denizens of the dark.