A closeup of the anttenae shows a sawtooth edge.

When I put up my outdoor light sheet recently, I was able to photograph this handsome creature. It is about 1/2 inch long. My first thought was that it was some sort of beetle, since its shape was sort of similar to that of a Lightning Bug (which are really beetles), However, I had never seen such a brilliantly colored beetle in my flipping through the pages of many beetle field guides. A search of the internet with an appropriate search phrase enabled me to identify it by flipping through the images that appeared.

It is, in fact, not a beetle or any closely related insect. it is a moth, the Ailanthus Webworm Moth (Atteva aurea). It is named The “Ailanthus” Webworm Moth, because the most common host plant for its larvae is Ailanthus altissima. commonly called the Princess Tree. This tree is a very invasive species first introduced into North America in 1784. I will illustrate one of these trees in a future post.