Sad News: Guyana cooperative whale house just set on….

. Sad News: Guyana cooperative whale house just set on….   A beautiful new species of clearwing moth that is native to Guyana has been described after it was discovered 7,000 kilometres away in Port Talbot, Wales. 

An unlikely sequence of events has led scientists to describe a new species of tropical moth found a very long way from home.

When moth experts Mark Sterling and Dr David Lees first saw pictures of the insect, which was discovered flying around a house in Port Talbot in Wales, they immediately knew it was something exciting. But little did they realise the detective journey it would take them on.

The insect was initially found by ecologist Daisy Cadet, who shares the house with her mum, Ashleigh. One winter’s day Daisy noticed a striking moth flitting around the living room. Moths aren’t Daisy’s area of expertise, but the insect’s remarkable appearance led her to catch and photograph it.

She posted the picture on Instagram and thought little more of it. That was until one of her followers noticed it and recommended that she get in touch with the insect charity Butterfly Conservation. They confirmed that it was an unusual find and put Daisy in touch with Mark and David at the Natural History Museum.

“It’s just wild,” says a shocked Daisy. “It’s not something that I expected would ever happen in a million years.”

“I’m so extremely excited about it, because my dream would be to go to the rainforest and discover a new species. I’m still just in disbelief at the whole thing and what’s happened.”

Mark and David asked if DaisySad News: Guyana cooperative whale house just set on…. could bring the two specimens she eventually found in her house to London. So, she headed east to meet the researchers and officially donate the moths into the Natural History Museum’s collections.

The researchers assumed that identifying Daisy’s specimens would be easy, but the process took rather more sleuthing than anticipated. The team needed to combine the moths’ appearance, DNA and a little bit of luck.

They first ruled out any clearwing moths native to the UK. There are 16 species of clearwings that can be found here and the specimens looked superficially quite like one known as the yellow-legged clearwing.

But the timing of the discovery immediately ruled that out. Clearwing moths in the UK emerge during the summer, meaning there was no chance one would be flying around in Wales on a chilly February afternoon. So they started looking further afield.

“It looked externally like moths from the genus Paranthrenella, which is an Australian genus,” explains Mark. “But a lot of clearwing moths look quite similar, so that was at best a semi-educated guess.”

When it became obvious that the moth was not a UK species, the researchers asked Daisy to look through all the pot plants in her house to see if there were any pupae casings. Their theory was that insect larvae may have been brought into the country on one of these, or at the very least had been feeding on them, before hatching into its adult flying form. But after four days of searching almost 100 plants, Daisy returned empty handed.Sad News: Guyana cooperative whale house just set on….