What had six legs, two tentacles, four furry appendages sticking out from behind, and at once used its appearance to scare everyone on the Internet into a stream of urine?
The answer is erect: a super-terrible long-horned moth. Last week, an Indonesian netizen took a video of the moth and posted it on Facebook, a move that caused a huge shock to people on the Internet, and more than 40,000 people commented worriedly under the video: Oh my God, what the hell is this?
credit: Gandik/FaceBook
But take it easy.
Gary Hevel, an entomologist working at the Smithsonian Museum of Natural History, unveiled the mysterious insect, saying that the video is just a black-striped gray lantern moth, latin for Creatonotos gangis. Hevel wrote in an email to the Washington Post that the black-striped gray lantern moth is using its stink glands to attract the opposite sex to mate, and those strange and disgusting appendages are called stink glands. The stink glands in the moth's abdomen are in a state of contraction. One network of data suggests that the moth is widely distributed in parts of Southeast Asia and Australia, and that adults of this moth will have a pair of brown front wings, each with a discontinuous dark stripe. The hind wings are white and the abdomen is red or yellow. The male black-striped gray lamp moth has four stink glands on the back of its abdomen, which are used to divergent pheromones. Each stink gland stretches slightly longer than the abdomen. The wingspan of the black-striped gray lamp moth is about 4 cm.
In the comments on the video, several well-informed netizens also helped explain the origin of the moths and why they diverge from pheromones. "Dude, this moth is pretty!" Some people even commented on it. But there are still many people who are very disgusted by this: "I was not afraid of moths, but now I am completely afraid of going crazy." ”
The article was published in the Washington Post.
This article is translated from sciencealert and published by gilliano under the Creative Commons License (BY-NC).