This morning I found several lovely moths on my porch.
I didn't know what they were, but they were striking enough that I knew I could find out just by using the power of the internet.
It may seem overwhelming to start to identify an insect if you have no idea what it is, but the internet is made for boneheads, so for these moths I googled an image search for, "yellow and black moth Sonoma." Its always a good idea to include a location when you're searching for insect IDs, believe me. County is a common piece of data recorded for biological collections. Lo, I scrolled through the first page of results and found a visual match from butterfliesandmoths.org, which suggested that this was Grammia ornata, the ornate tiger moth. Their map showed a lot of sightings from the bay area, which was encouraging.
But how could I be sure this wasn't some species that looked a lot like G. ornata, but wasn't? Some insects can look almost identical to each other (to the untrained eye) but still be different species. Since my moths looked so similar to the G. ornata in the picture, and since it was in the right locality, I figured that Grammia was probably a good guess for the genus. Butterfliesandmoths.org lets you search by scientific name (under "Learn -> Species Search") and I found about 30 different species in the Grammia genus. That's a lot of clicking to do, so instead I went over to Pacific Northwest Moths.
This is a great website for (you guessed it) butterfly and moth identification... if you live in the Pacific Northwest. However, there's often some overlap in ranges of insects between northern California and Oregon, and I really like how user-friendly this site is. One of the greatest aspects is the "Similar Species" feature for each entry. For G. ornata, two similar species were suggested: G. complicata (only found near the Salish Sea in Washington) and G. edwardsii, which is rare, but found in the vicinity of San Francisco. Well, that got my attention. The distinguishing characteristics were clearly spelled out, and one of them seemed easy enough for me to check: G. edwardsii has antennae that are pale at the base, whereas G. ornata antennae are dark all the way through. The likelihood of finding a rare species sitting on my porch - actually, three of them - is pretty small, but I wanted to be thorough, because you never know! This is how exciting things in entomology are discovered!
Since I had done a sketch of the moth, I knew I had paid pretty close attention to details like that, but I checked the moths that were still sitting on my porch, just to be sure. Sure enough, dark antennae.
The last website that I checked out is the one I usually go to first for insect ID, BugGuide.net. This site has a ton of photos submitted by pros and amateurs, and has a really clear way of showing the classification system for each taxa you're looking into.
Poking around into all of these sites - not just one - helped me feel confident that I had the right ID for these moths. Each site gives slightly different information for its entries, which is good for cross-checking, looking into location information, and in general putting the pieces together.
Why go through all the trouble to put a name to a moth? There's a lot of poetic things said about names, and honestly, I find most of them to be true when it comes to understanding the natural world. If you don't think it worth naming, it tends to slip by and be forgotten. If you can put a name to something, you make a place for it in your mind. You form a relationship with it. It becomes unique. You remember it. You understand it in way that you didn't before. You can recognize it when you see it again. And the value of that is that you now have another personal connection with some other small part of that big world out there. That big world gets a bit bigger, and you get a bit bigger, too.
<> Abner
