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Photo#380055
Diurnal moth - Adela trigrapha - female

Diurnal moth - Adela trigrapha - Female
Marin County, California, USA
March 27, 2010
Size: ~20 mm wingspan
I found a group of these insects leisurely flitting around a mountain meadow today, and I was initially perplexed by them. I thought they were butterflies until I noticed the long antennae, and even once I realized they were moths I was still amazed by them, since they are like no other moth I'd seen before. When I was observing them, the best term I could come up with to describe their behavior was "fairy-like"... Imagine my surprise when I looked in the guide and found out they're called fairy moths! They seem like they belong in a movie or some kind of fantasy realm the way they drift around above the meadow on a spring afternoon.

I didn't know it at the time, but there were actually two species out - Adela eldorada with the red heads and short antennae, and Adela trigrapha with the black heads and long antennae. They were found in mixed-species groups.

EDIT: This moth has actually been confirmed to be a female Adela trigrapha by a local lepidopterist, as A. eldorada does not occur along the coast... Hopefully more details coming shortly.

Moved
Moved from Adela eldorada.

 
males and females
If all your Fairy Moths had bands on their wings you were almost certainly seeing males and females of the same species. Both A. eldorada and A. trigrapha are conspicuously sexually dimorphic. See other posts on BugGuide. I say "almost certainly" for two reasons. 1) Although eldorada has not yet been found in the Coast Ranges, it could be there; one of it's suspected host plants, Erythranthe guttata, is widespread there. 2) Some of us are wondering, based on observed ovipositional behavior, if trigrapha consists of more than one species. But if you found the moths flying together chances are that those are all the same species.

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