Flicker ghost-like through space, and collect the news of other worlds
August 13, 2022 11:53 AM   Subscribe

Rebecca Giggs (Emergence Magazine, 06/27/2022), "Noiseless Messengers": "THE MOTHS, when they came, were said to appear first like sea fog massing above the ocean." ABC News - Australia (12/11/2022), "Why bogong moths are now being classified as an endangered species." ABC Indigenous (07/04/2019), "This Place: The Journey of the Bogong Moths." Birgitta Stephenson, et al., (2020), "2000 Year-old Bogong moth (Agrotis infusa) Aboriginal food remains, Australia." Eric Warrant, et al., (2016), "The Australian Bogong Moth Agrotis infusa: A Long-Distance Nocturnal Navigator." David Dreyer, et al. (2018), "The Earth's Magnetic Field and Visual Landmarks Steer Migratory Flight Behavior in the Nocturnal Australian Bogong Moth." Ken Green, et al. (2021), "Australian Bogong moths Agrotis infusa (Lepidoptera: Noctuidae), 1951–2020: decline and crash" [PDF].
posted by Wobbuffet (3 comments total) 6 users marked this as a favorite
 
12/11/2022

Er, 2021, sorry--though I'm not aware if the moths also collect news from the future.
posted by Wobbuffet at 12:10 PM on August 13, 2022


On another occasion, said Austerlitz, Great-Uncle Alphonso took us up the hill behind the house on a still, moonless night to spend a few hours looking into the mysterious world of moths. Most of us, said Austerlitz, know nothing about moths except that they eat holes in carpets and clothes and have to be kept at bay by the use of camphor and naphthalene, although in truth their lineage is among the most ancient and most remarkable in the whole history of nature. Soon after darkness fell we were sitting on a promontory far above Andromeda Lodge, behind us the higher slopes and before us the immense darkness out at sea, and no sooner had Alphonso placed his incandescent lamp in a shallow hollow surrounded by heather and lit it than the moths, not one of which we had seen during our climb, came flying in as if from nowhere, describing thousands of different arcs and spirals and loops, until like snowflakes they formed a silent storm around the light, while others, wings whirring, crawled over the sheet spread under the lamp or else, exhausted by their wild circling, settled in the gray recesses of the egg boxes stacked in a crate by Alphonso to provide shelter for them. I do remember, said Austerlitz, that the two of us, Gerald and I, could not get over our amazement at the endless variety of these invertebrates, which are usually hidden from our sight, and that Alphonso let us simply gaze at their wonderful display for a long time, but I don’t recollect now exactly what kinds of night-winged creatures landed there beside us, perhaps they were China Marks, Dark Porcelains and Marbled Beauties, Scarce Silver-lines or Burnished Brass, Green Foresters and Green Adelas, White Plumes, Light Arches, Old Ladies and Ghost Moths, but at any rate we counted dozens of them, so different in structure and appearance that neither Gerald nor I could grasp it all. Some had collars and cloaks, like elegant gentlemen on their way to the opera, said Gerald; some had a plain basic hue, but when they moved their wings showed a fantastic lining underneath, with oblique and wavy lines, shadows, crescent markings and lighter patches, freckles, zigzag bands, fringes and veining and colors you could never have imagined, moss green shot with blue, fox brown, saffron, lime yellow, satiny white, and a metallic gleam as of powdered brass or gold. Many of them were still resplendent in immaculate garments, others, their short lives almost over, had torn and ragged wings. Alphonso told us how each of these extravagant creatures had its own character, and that many of them lived only among alders, or on hot, stony slopes, in pastures on poor soil, or on moors. Describing their previous existence as larvae, he said that almost all caterpillars ate only one kind of food—the roots of couch grass, the leaves of sallow or barberry, withered bramble foliage—and they stuffed themselves with that chosen food, said Alphonso, until they became well-nigh senseless, whereas the moths ate nothing more at all for the rest of their lives, and were bent solely on the business of reproduction. They did sometimes seem to suffer thirst, and in periods of drought, when no dew had fallen at night for a long time, it was apparently known for them to set out together in a kind of cloud in search of the nearest river or stream, where they drowned in large numbers as they tried to settle on the flowing water. And I also remember what Alphonso said about the extraordinarily keen hearing of moths, said Austerlitz. They can make out the squeaking of bats from a great distance, and he, Alphonso, had himself noticed that in the evening, when the housekeeper came out into the yard to call her cat Enid in that shrill voice of hers, they always rose from the bushes and flew away into the darker trees. During the day, said Alphonso, they slept safely hidden under stones, or in cracks in the rock, in leaf litter on the ground or among foliage. Most of them are in a deathlike state when you find them, and have to coax and quiver themselves back to life, crawling over the ground and jerkily moving their wings and legs before they are ready for flight. Their body temperature will then be thirty-six degrees Celsius, like that of mammals, and of dolphins and tunny fish swimming at full speed. Thirty-six degrees, according to Alphonso, has always proved the best natural level, a kind of magical threshold, and it had sometimes occurred to him, Alphonso, said Austerlitz, that all mankind’s misfortunes were connected with its departure at some point in time from that norm, and with the slightly feverish, overheated condition in which we constantly found ourselves. On that summer night, said Austerlitz, we sat high above the estuary of the Mawddach in our hollow in the hills until daybreak, watching the moths fly to us, perhaps some ten thousand of them by Alphonso’s estimate. The trails of light which they seemed to leave behind them in all kinds of curlicues and streamers and spirals, and which Gerald in particular admired, did not really exist, explained Alphonso, but were merely phantom traces created by the sluggish reaction of the human eye, appearing to see a certain afterglow in the place from which the insect itself, shining for only the fraction of a second in the lamplight, had already gone. It was such unreal phenomena, said Alphonso, the sudden incursion of unreality into the real world, certain effects of light in the landscape spread out before us, or in the eye of a beloved person, that kindled our deepest feelings, or at least what we took for them. Although I did not study natural history later, said Austerlitz, many of Great-Uncle Alphonso’s botanical and zoological disquisitions have remained in my mind. Only a few days ago I was rereading that passage in Darwin he once showed me, describing a flock of butterflies flying uninterruptedly for several hours ten miles out from the South American coast, when even with a telescope it was impossible to find a patch of empty sky visible between their whirling wings. But I always found what Alphonso told us at that time about the life and death of moths especially memorable, and of all creatures I still feel the greatest awe for them. In the warmer months of the year one or other of those nocturnal insects quite often strays indoors from the small garden behind my house. When I get up early in the morning, I find them clinging to the wall, motionless. I believe, said Austerlitz, they know they have lost their way, since if you do not put them out again carefully they will stay where they are, never moving, until the last breath is out of their bodies, and indeed they will remain in the place where they came to grief even after death, held fast by the tiny claws that stiffened in their last agony, until a draft of air detaches them and blows them into a dusty corner.
W. G. Sebald, Austerlitz
posted by derrinyet at 8:45 PM on August 13, 2022 [3 favorites]


I work at Parliament House, which was famous for attracting enormous clouds of bogongs every spring during their migration. There would be a carpet of dead moths in every glass-covered walkway every morning. I went up in a skylight once and the layer of dead moths was ankle-deep. Building management would send reminders out asking people not to leave doors open.

Last year I saw one moth.
posted by the duck by the oboe at 5:12 PM on August 15, 2022 [2 favorites]


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