General interest

Phyllonorycter tristrigella – New to Ireland!

General interest, Leaf Mine, New to Ireland, Rare sightings / February 8, 2023

15.078 Phyllonorycter tristrigella (Haworth, 1828)

16th August 2022, Minnowburn, Belfast. Off on my regular morning jaunt with our dog, Milou we ended up by the Minnowburn stream where there is good tree cover including a couple of Wych Elms Ulmus glabra in the under-storey. I initially noticed a gallery mine (turned out to be Stigmella lemniscella – yellow larva present) but then to my astonishment a tentiform mine of a Phyllonorycter, something I had never previously seen on Wych Elm, caught my eye. There are only two options in GB noted on the leaf mining websites, P. tristrigella and P. schreberella. There are no cross-over species listed i.e. species on the “wrong” host. A quick run through the keys and checking images quickly confirmed the mine to be P tristrigella. P. schreberella forms an oval tent/blotch, often crossing veins, it is uncommon on Wych Elm and has a very southern distribution in GB. Tristrigella mines lie between veins forming a strongly contracted tube running from mid-rib to leaf edge, obvious in the attached images. There are a few strong folds on this mine which hard to capture in the image as the mine is so puckered causing them to merge. Frass was tightly packed in bottom corner of the mine. The mine was vacated. Amazingly following this discovery Eamonn O’Donnell found a long vacated mine, also on Wych Elm, in Dublin the following day!  Thanks again to CEDaR and the Environmental Recorders Group small grant. To date I have found it nowhere else despite searching.

Dave Allen 22/08/22

4.057 Stigmella suberivora (Stainton, 1869) New to Ireland

General interest, Leaf Mine, New to Ireland, Rare sightings / August 16, 2022

Thanks to a small grant from National Parks and Wildlife Service I was able to survey leaf mining Lepidoptera in the Republic of Ireland. Although my focus was on the border counties where leaf miners are seriously under recorded I kept the brief broad. This allowed me to travel to Meath and Dublin where I teamed up with my old friend Eamonn O’Donnell and his partner Kerri Gorentz. One of our search areas was to be the Botanic Gardens and Cemetery at Glasnevin, Co Dublin. These places are usually good for leaf miners with an array of exotic, non-native trees and shrubs. I was also well aware of the recent discovery of Ectoedemia heringella on evergreen oaks Quercus ilex at the Botanic Gardens.

E. heringella was easily found in both the Gardens and cemetery. Typically, it is already abundant with multiple mines on many leaves. I knew from looking at leaf mines in France and London that another species could also occur on these trees, S. suberivora, but that finding it has become much harder because of the density of heringella mines which can obscure it.

After about fifteen minutes of searching I found what I believed to be two mines of suberivora. Both were on leaves lacking heringella mines. The heringella mines are small ad compact taking up on average less than a square cm whereas the two suberivora mines were long (just over 4cm) and along the leaf margin. Mines of both were packed with black frass and egg upper in both cases. Without backlighting the mines are buffish in colour. As heringella increases in numbers, which it will, then suberivora is likely to become increasingly difficult to locate. A number of UK experts concurred with the identification.

Mines of E. heringella

 

Mine of S. suberivora (backlit)

 

The same mine without backlighting

Dave Allen July 2022

49.288 Epiblema foenella – First Irish record.

General interest, New to Ireland, Rare moth sightings / March 30, 2022

I’ve been moth trapping in my suburban garden in Baldoyle, Co Dublin since 2010, usually with a 40W actinic Skinner trap.  The weather forecast for the night of the 21st/22nd July 2021 looked OK for moths so I set up the trap in its usual spot against the wall of my garden shed.  The next morning the minimum recorded temperature overnight had been 14.8 deg. C and a quick peek into the trap showed a lot of moths in among the egg trays (after processing the catch, I had 44 species, quite a good haul for my area).

I noticed a somewhat striking micro moth on the shed wall and took a couple of shots with it before going through the contents of the trap.  For some reason I thought it looked familiar and didn’t pay it too much attention.  How wrong I was!

I was more interested in a Yellowtail and a Chevron, both fairly infrequent records for me.  It was only later when I started going through the photos of all the species that I wasn’t able to identify on sight, that I realized I had caught something special.  Of course, when I rushed back down to the shed it was gone (hopefully not down the gullet of my opportunistic resident Robin).

Despite it being a quite unique looking micro moth, it didn’t leap off the page when I was going through the Sterling field guide but posting a photo on the MI Facebook page quickly had me pointed in the right direction (thanks everyone), Epiblema foenella.  As usual, when I went back to the field guide I was left wondering how I missed it first time around.  There isn’t really anything else it could have been.

The map in Sterling confirms its presence in north Wales including Anglesey and also the Isle of Man, so it really was only a matter of time before it turned up on our shores.  The larval food plant is listed as Mugwort Artemisia vulgaris which is certainly common along the east coast.

2021 has been a somewhat unusual year for mothing in my garden.  As well as the Epiblema foenella record, I had shared a joint first Irish record of Euzophera pinguis with Gareth O’Donnell just a fortnight earlier.  I had also recorded quite a few ‘firsts’ for my garden, both macro and micro moths.  After running a trap on the same site for so many years it was very unusual and very exciting to add so many new species to the site list in a single season.  Adding two to the national species list is an added bonus.  All this excitement is tempered somewhat when I look at the number of species that have completely disappeared from my garden since I started recording or others whose numbers continue to decline with each passing year.

Cian Merne

 

Homoeosoma nimbella – New to Ireland

General interest, New to Ireland / February 16, 2022

On 1 June 2020, while walking along the clifftops at Islandikane East, Co. Waterford (Vice-county H6; Irish grid reference X536983), on the south-east coast of Ireland, TB disturbed a moth which he recognised as a pyralid belonging to either Homoeosoma or Phycitodes. Knowing the difficulty in separating some of these species, the temptation was to simply ignore it, but considering the early date TB decided to retain the moth for further inspection. Along with some other specimens it was eventually sent to KGMB who by both female genitalia examination, and by the details of the forewing markings, determined the moth to be Homoeosoma nimbella (Duponchel, 1836).

There are no Irish specimens in the National Museum of Ireland, Natural History (NMINH), and this species is believed to be new to the Irish fauna (see Bond & O’Connor, 2012. Additions, deletions and corrections to an annotated checklist of the Irish butterflies and moths (Lepidoptera) with a concise checklist of Irish species and Elachista biatomella (Stainton, 1848) new to Ireland. Bulletin of the Irish Biogeographical Society 36: 60-179). Goater (1986. British Pyralid Moths: A guide to their identification. Harley Books) states that the British distribution is imperfectly known and does not include any reference to Irish reports. The species is mapped on the National Biodiversity Network website (accessed 7 May 2021) from England, Wales, Scotland and the Channel Islands, but not from Ireland. Ireland is similarly lacking in representation at the Fauna Europaea website (https://fauna-eu.org/).  The moth will be lodged with the NMINH, Dublin.

The larvae of H. nimbella feed on Sheep’s-bit Jasione montana, with the adults flying from May to August, inhabiting sand dunes, sea cliffs and stone walls on the coast (see e.g., Sterling, P., Parsons, M. & Lewington, R., 2012.  Field Guide to the Micromoths of Great Britain and Ireland. British Wildlife Publishing).

Bryant, T. & Bond, K.G.M., 2021. Homoeosoma nimbella (Duponchel, 1836) (Lep.: Pyralidae) new to Ireland. Entomologist’s Record & Journal of Variation 133: 160-161.

Tony Bryant.

42.001 Pachyrhabda steropodes – New to Ireland!

General interest, New to Ireland / April 25, 2021

From Australia to Ireland!

During the lockdown in April/May 2020, I spent a lot of time across the fields in Knocksink Wood O213182 in north Co. Wicklow.  With the fine weather, two or three days a week were spent in the wood netting anything that flew – wasps, bees, moths, the lot. The normal method was to net, bottle, identify and release.

Anything that was not readily identified in the field was taken home to the fridge. Each jar was then taken out, the insect identified if possible and photographed if in good condition.

Eventually there was one or two jars left with problematic creatures. These were again checked, photographed and the photos filed for further study. The next day everything was taken to the woods for releasing.

It was into this last category that a small micro moth fell. It wasn’t until 2 Feb 2021 that I contacted MothsIreland to see if they could help with the identification. A few days later I was informed that Eamonn O’Donnell had identified the moth as Pachyrhabda steropodes. It was new to Ireland and was native to Australia! It is classified as an adventive species that probably arrived here with imported plants.

Pachyrhabda steropodes was first found in England in Dorset in 2010, and has since spread to Devon and Wales.

My task for 2021 is to find another Pachyrhabda steropodes for the Natural History Museum!

Kieran Finch.

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